


Crumbling Landscapes

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 4x15 Tag, 4x15 spoilers, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, post 4x15
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-09-26 19:39:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 23,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9919151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: "The first thing that startles her is how utterly real it feels. She knew that it would, of course, she’s been in simulations before. The fight with Coulson that might as well have been real except for the unformed bruises on her skin. But this."Speculation for what could happen in the third part of Season 4.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So here it is! The first chapter of my spec fic that you'll know about if you read my other 4x15 pieces (shameless plug, check 'em out maybe?)  
> Honestly, I've got no idea what this is going to turn into, all I've got is a metric ton of episode notes, too much enthusiasm, and not enough coffee. Okay? Enjoy the ride.  
> Spoilers for 4x15: Self Control

The first thing that startles her is how utterly real it feels. She knew that it would, of course, she’s been in simulations before. The fight with Coulson that might as well have been real except for the unformed bruises on her skin. But this.

The heat from the water, sinking into her skin, the porcelain of the tub, firm yet slippery, the air that bubbles past her lungs, glancing across her cheekbones on its way to the surface, it all feels so real. The hollowness under her skin is barely noticeable.

She struggles against her own mind beneath the surface of the bubbles. Thoughts, ideas, memories conflict. A life that she didn’t live swims just beyond her reach. Some of the details she can grab on to, a to-go cup of coffee in a busy shop, the frowning brow of a woman she recognizes but doesn’t know, the ghost of a hand caressing down her ribs, but most slip away, through her fingers as easily as the water around her. 

By the time she gets her head up to break the surface her lungs are burning from the lack of oxygen. Pressure that builds up inside her chest that pulls her towards the surface, despite her somewhat helpless thrashing. The air that cleans her lungs manages to refocus her fully. 

The rendezvous point, she has to get to the rendezvous point. 

A phone buzzes beside the tub that must be hers. She picks up the foreign technology curiously, not only is it not her usual cell, it’s like nothing she’s ever seen before. She doesn’t allow herself any time to marvel over it as she reads the text. 

Her boyfriend. 

The thought shocks her so much that the device slips from her grip, almost into the tub with her, but she manages enough control that it bumps onto the bathmat instead. 

Could it really be?

Everything else slips away as she makes her way out of the bathroom. A body lies in the bed, under a pile of blankets, turned away from her enough that she can’t make out the shape’s face. She has to get closer.

“Lincoln?” She breathes. She doesn’t dare wake him. She doesn’t dare disrupt this which must be a dream. 

He died. She lost him. 

Daisy steps around to the side of the bed and recoils. She clutches the robe across her chest and stutters backwards until her hip reaches the dresser. Something clatters and falls at the clumsy contact. She can’t look to see what it was. 

Ward.

Every possible emotion runs through her in a second. Grief, hurt, betrayal, confusion, anger. She ends up cold. Goosebumps flash across her skin.

He’s waking, disturbed by her disturbance, and she gets stuck in place. Her feet may as well be soldered to the floor. They can’t move as he rolls over and stretches, one hand slipping across the blankets to the other side of the bed. A shudder runs through her at the intimacy of the action. He’s obviously looking for someone, and there’s no one here but her. 

By the time he’s realized that he’s alone in the bed and is sitting up, she’s still rooted to her spot on the hardwood. She can’t comprehend this. 

He drags a hand over his face and smiles at her. “Morning.”

She should reply, smile at least, but all she can do is gape. It makes him get up and move towards her. 

“Skye?” he looks like he’s going to touch her shoulder. She pulls back further, curving her spine around the dresser, pressing back firmly enough that the wood cuts through to her skin.

“I- what?” The icy chill in her veins isn’t fading. Nausea presses at the front of her throat. How is this happening?

“Are you okay?” There’s an ease to him that’s just so Ward. Not Hive, not the monster he became or the monster he already was, when she saw him as a prisoner of SHIELD, but just her SO. It makes her feel small, young, weaker than she knows she is. It turns her into someone reminiscent of the girl who first met him. The name doesn’t help. 

“Yeah, uh, fine. We got called in.” Which instinct tells her to play along, she’s not sure, but it seems like the safest option at the moment. Much better than the confrontation that’s now burning to a blaze under her skin as the shock fades. What is this place? What have she and Simmons gotten themselves into?

He nods, steps closer, lays a hand on her shoulder that she has to grit her teeth not to throw off, and kisses the side of her head. It’s still damp from her submersion in the tub. That seems like a lifetime away but also like it’s still happening. 

“I’ll shower, then we’ll go.”

She nods, numb.

He’s naked. So naked, she realizes for the first time as he starts making his way back over her path towards the bathroom. She doesn’t notice she’s looked until she has, seen the sharp V of his torso, the definition of his back. Her gaze drops to the floor, focusing on a detail in the grain of the wood and squashing the blush rising in her cheeks. 

Those old feelings will not be making a reappearance, she’s sure of it.

The bathroom door swings shut behind him lazily, without enough force to click into the latch, to allow Daisy some proper solitude. She sighs her way through a breath once she hears the water running in the shower. 

She turns around, pressing her palms into the surface of the dresser. Two deep breaths, with her eyes closed, is all she allows herself to get her emotions under control. Once she does, her gaze drops down onto the top of the dresser. There’s a lamp, a basket full of creams, products which, after a cursory shuffle, she discovers are not the ones she’s used to using, and a framed picture of the two of them smiling, Ward’s arm comfortably slung over her shoulder, her fingers tangled with his. The object that fell is a hula girl, either the same one that used to be on the dashboard of her van or one very similar. 

She picks it up carefully, twisting it to see every angle before she sets it down once again. It wobbles, next to the photograph. She doesn’t want to look at either. Instead, she looks around the rest of the room, hoping for some indication of what the hell her life is in this place. 

The entirety of the space is so, not her. Granted she’s been living in SHIELD bases – which have a propensity for exploding perennially - or on the run for the last four years of her life, then just a van before that, so she’s never really developed a taste in design per say. Regardless, whatever this is, it isn’t her. 

So it’s his place then, or he picked it out. Her mind swims with questions. She starts opening drawers. 

He’s only going to be minutes in the shower, she remembers that from living on the Bus with him, he’d perfected the military efficiency, so she doesn’t have much time to search. Anything would be helpful at this point though. Anything that would explain what got twisted up to land her in this world that isn’t at all like her own. Simmons said that it was supposed to be identical.

Identical.

He called her Skye.

She looks down at her hands. They look precisely like her hands. She tries to feel the pulse of her heart within the veins, the neat ordering of bones and the muscles that fiber them together. The shred of panic rises. 

Reaching out, she tries to grab onto the waver of the air in the perfectly still room. She looks for the building, the stress of its joists and the weakness below it, beneath the ground. Her mind’s eye reaches down, through the other floors of the structure, beneath the building’s basement and below the rock even under that, searching for the threads, flexing her carefully contained muscle. 

She holds her breath. 

Nothing. 

~~

Jemma opens her eyes and blinks.

It’s dark, darker than dark really, more like there’s nothing there to see. She blinks again, trying to differentiate which end of the motion of her eyes is open and which is closed. She can’t. The surface her back lays against is hard, unforgiving, yet almost plush.

Claustrophobia creeps up the back of her neck and she tries to breathe it away. The air is dry, but rapidly moistening. She must not be in a very large space. It smells so heavily of soil she can taste it. Going into the simulation, she thought she was prepared for anything, she didn’t expect this, whatever it is. 

She lifts her hand, touching her eye to ensure it actually is open, then presses it out in the space beyond her face. It meets resistance almost immediately. Silken fabric drapes down from something and when she presses into it she meets the same hard surface beneath her spine. Wood then, beneath the fabric. Her hand slides up, testing to see how far it extends, reaching the corner just above the top of her head. 

She curls her hand to a fist and knocks. 

The silk masks the sound slightly as Simmons knocks two dull thuds into the wood. The frame doesn’t give. The sound goes nowhere. 

She gasps, realization crashing down. Wood box lined with soft fabric but no padding. Both of her hands press into the silk above her face, she pushes with all her strength. 

Nothing happens. 

It’s a coffin. 

She’s been buried alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm thinking these chapters are going to be a little on the shorter side in general so I can get them out more quickly but let me know your thoughts on that. If you guys would prefer longer ones I can do that too, it would just mean longer breaks between.  
> Just a point of interest I thought I'd mention is that I basically have read nothing in regards to actual theories about how the season is going to progress and the few that I have read, I've completely disregarded while writing this. This story is mostly just to keep me (and hopefully you) entertained while we wait for the next episode and while I'm confident that it'll progress realistically, I'm absolutely certain that it won't be anywhere near what the show runners actually put out.  
> Anyways, let me know what you think and as always I'm around on Tumblr @sinkingsidewalks


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to think of this chapter as 'a comprehensive guide to digging yourself out of a grave'

Daisy dresses, then follows Ward out of the apartment in a haze, still reeling. She doesn’t have her powers. They never even considered, coming in here, that she wouldn’t have her powers. 

Is it because the framework can’t handle them? Do inhumans not exist here?

She has no answers. Just questions, and a shrinking amount of time before Ward realizes that there’s something very off about his girlfriend. Or who she hopes is his girlfriend. She might actually die if they’re engaged. When this is all over she’s going to get a bottle of tequila and have a long night of forgetting about all this.

They’re in a parking garage before she really realizes where they’re going. Ward is standing on the passenger side looking at her expectantly. It takes her a moment to realize that he said her name. Well, he said Skye, which is apparently her name again.

“Did you forget your keys?”

She puts her hand in her jacket pocket and pulls the keys out instinctually, apparently fake her leaves them in the same spot as real her. Except she can’t drive because she doesn’t know where they’re going. An echo sparks, one of driving down the highway with some kind of loud music playing and Ward in the passenger seat, but she can’t figure out the location, or their destination.

“I think I’m getting a migraine, why don’t you drive.” She tosses the keys smoothly over the roof of the car into Ward’s hands. He gives her a quirk of a frown but swaps sides with her without any further questioning. 

Yeah, she’s going to be having a lot of migraines if they end up staying in this place for a while. 

He drives just like she remembers. Smooth and fast, with that easy confidence of having his eyes on the road but not paying any real attention to it, like it’s not worth his time. She hates the dredge of memories. It’s all the ones that she supressed, shoved away, because he’s a traitor, in her own world at least, this one she’s not so sure. 

She runs her fingers through her hair and tries not to make a face when the ends don’t free her fingers as she expects them to. Another thing she’ll have to adjust to quickly.

They don’t spend long on the highway, it’s still early enough that they’ve beat the rush of commuters, and before she knows it there’s a building looming before her that looks suspiciously similar to the Triskelion headquarters that used to be on the Potomac before SHIELD fell with Hydra. 

The unease that’s been building in her gut since she woke up here spikes, her instincts telling her something that her conscious mind hasn’t yet caught up with yet. Something’s wrong. More wrong than just Aida messing with her love life.

She puts her hand in her pocket, feels the badge that was there earlier along with her keys and pulls it out. The outside looks just like the one that Coulson – temporarily – handed her all those years ago only on this one the leather casing has actually had time to wear in. Without cause, she holds her breath as she flips the thing open. 

It takes her a moment to realize what’s wrong with it, she’s too preoccupied with the information written on the card – particularly ANALYST where she expected SPECIALIST - but then she looks closer. The badge itself is not a different shape but the imprint on it is, instead of the friendly eagle she’s met with something she hasn’t seen in what feels like a decade now. The hydra, skull and octopus limbs. Her heart stutters to a stop as she looks up, the rounded edge of the building coming into view. The same symbol is painted on for all to see. 

She needs to get out of this car. 

~~

Simmons panics. 

Her hands dig into the fabric, gripping uselessly as her nails scramble against the wood. Her heart thunders in her chest. Her breathing rasps against the inside of her throat. 

No. Breathing. Stop.

She doesn’t draw another breath, feels the pull of want for air under her collar bones, and focuses. The calmer she is the longer her air will last. She draws in a breath through her teeth. 

There’s a way out of this. She knows there is. Fitz was rambling on about it the other day. Well, she supposes that must have been a few months ago now actually. They were watching a show and he started rambling on about the techniques for escaping a buried coffin. 

“Okay.” She says to herself, aloud, even though she knows it’s using more air than she has. It’ll keep her calm, being able to talk this through like any other problem. 

“Dimensions of a casket,” she splays her hands over the lid above her face, from end to end, trying to estimate the measurement. Then stretches her feet down to find the end. She has to shimmy down slightly to reach it. 

“Five foot three,” her own height, she stretches her hand above her head, “Plus maybe, twenty inches,” she converts the numbers quickly, “is 84 inches long, times maybe thirty inches across, times-“ she feels up the side of the casket, “twenty inches high.”

Another slow carefully controlled breath makes its way through her lungs, she can already feel the CO2 build up. Her nails dig into her palms as she does more mental math. 

“-Would be, about 900 litres, minus the average human body volume of 66 litres. That leaves 830, one fifth of which is oxygen, so if that’s consumed at a rate of point five litres per minute that allows about five and a half hours of air left.” Her breath shakes through her on the way out. “Okay.”

“Except of course once that time runs out I’ll suffocate, dying in the framework which also means dying in real life.” No problem at all. 

Daisy won’t find her in that time either, she’s got to dig herself out. 

What was Fitz prattling on about? 

She takes stock. Her clothes are a simple blouse and trousers, there doesn’t seem to be anything here buried with her, nothing to jab at the boards of the coffin with. She runs her hands over the surface of the thing, it’s bowed in towards her under the weight of the earth but there aren’t any cracks. Of course her family would choose to bury her in an expensive box.

Air. Air is the biggest problem. Once she gets the coffin to cave in on itself dirt will pile atop her, crushing the air from her chest, like an avalanche of snow, like an explosion at the bottom of the ocean. The world is only six feet above her head. If she could stand right now she’d be able to break her fingers through to the surface. 

She wriggles her arms out of the sleeves of the shirt. Thankfully it’s one piece, no buttons lining down the front so she pulls it up to her neck, tying the sleeves like a bag around her head. It feels weird, and even more claustrophobic, but it will keep her mouth, and hopefully her lungs, free of dirt.

She makes her plan, visualizing it is easy in the pressing darkness, and hopes to the stars that Fitz’s theory works.

The silken lining caves under her grip. She shreds it, causing a gaping hole from the top of the coffin all the way down to her feet. 

“Beat the lid until you start getting dirt falling in.” It’s Fitz’s voice in her mind as she speaks the words to herself, following his guide the best she can remember. She batters the wood with her knees and fists, the space is too small for her to build up proper momentum though so more than half the hits end up dull. Her knuckles go raw before the wood cracks. 

There’s a snap, around the center of the lid where her knee connects and a dribble of cool dirt scatters over her pants. She hits the same point again. The hole opens up a little more, chunks of mud falling in. She shoves the dirt to the bottom of the box, filling it up around her and carving out a hole above. 

Once she’s filled the coffin as much a she can, her body curled up awkwardly beneath the crumped boards, she steadies her hands to make the next move. 

“Okay, Fitz,” she whispers, “here goes nothing.” She fills her lungs.

Tearing away the boards, widening the hole so that her shoulders will fit through, cascades soil into the coffin. It pours down and she uses the shift, the loosening of the dirt, to shove herself to her feet. Her lungs burn but she holds the breath inside. 

Dirt presses in against the shirt around her face and she claws upwards, digging her fingers through the damp earth. She tries to push her feet through it too, swimming up against the crushing current. Up and up, then- grass. She digs through the roots, mud sinking deep beneath her nail beds, until her fingers emerge on the surface. Air. Warm, fresh air. 

The rest is a bit of a disorientated struggle. The breath burns out of her lungs as she claws her way up to the surface, thrashing around to loosen the dirt enough to bring her body up to join her hands. 

Her face reaches the surface and she rips off the shirt covering it. A warm breeze ghosts over her skin. She could almost cry with relief. She laughs, lungs gasping, her chest still pressed up against the cool soil and drops her cheek down against the disrupted sod. 

“Thank you, Fitz,” she breathes, a tear slipping over her cheek, caving a track in the dirt. 

Now she only has to find him again. 

~~

The traffic emerges from nowhere. One second they’re cruising down the highway, the next there’s a line forming in the road in front of them, as far as Daisy can see. 

Ward glances over at her as he brings the vehicle to a stop. “Are you okay?”

Her skin feels cold; her face has gone ashen. This time, she can’t grit her teeth and fake it. She stares up at the looming building. 

How has this happened?

“I-“ she draws a breath. They’re sitting in a car, in gridlock traffic, and he’s got the only gun. She can’t believe this. 

The car in front of them rolls forward, he looks back at the road, Daisy jams her knuckles into his side and rips the gun from the holster beneath his open coat before he can even react. 

He groans, body crumpling from her hit. “What the hell, Skye?” 

She clicks off the safety, the weapon trained on the side of his skull. 

“You’re going to turn the car around.”

“Skye,” He warns her, but the cars start moving properly again, traffic picking up and he has no choice but to go along with it. 

“Take the next exit.”

“Skye.” It’s bitter, hard, the way his voice would sound when she teased him too far. 

“The next exit, Ward. Now.” She doesn’t give. 

“What’s going on Skye?” He does as she says though, bringing the car into the rightmost lane smoothly. Daisy doesn’t dare glance ahead to see where the exit will take them. Just because he’s driving doesn’t make him any less adept an agent, any less dangerous.

“I’m not the one who needs to be explaining things right now.”

His brow furrows, the speed of the car drops as they enter the exit ramp. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

She doesn’t answer him, uses a split second while he’s changing lanes again to glance around at the highway signs. They’re in DC, she knows DC – a little. They’re driving south, now on a different highway, along the river. She doesn’t want to give him an opportunity to get to the bridge, she doesn’t want be pointing a gun at a Hydra agent in front of the goddamn Hydra base. 

“Take the 110, south.”

He sighs but does it, his voice hard, dissaproving. “Where do you want to go Skye? The airport?”

Oh, maybe.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two updates in two days! don't get used to it though because I don't really know how this happened. Anyways, hope you enjoy!

The car bumps over a crack in the pavement, settling to a stop in the middle of the barren parking lot. Daisy presses her shoulder more firmly into the car door, steadying her grip on the gun. It’s not an ICER. 

“Here’s how this is going to work, you’re going to talk and I’m not going to shoot you.”

A plane roars overhead, low enough that it rattles the entire frame of the car. 

“If you don’t hold up your end, I won’t hold up mine, understood?”

He nods carefully, his eyes studying her. The gaze ghosts a shiver over her spine, it asses her as his prey.

“Okay, first question, why do we work for Hydra? What’s happened to SHIELD?”

His brow furrows into proper confusion for a moment before he adopts his easy confidence once again. “SHIELD? Skye there hasn’t been a SHIELD in years, you know that.”

Daisy grits her teeth. “Pretend that I don’t.”

The realization is forming behind his eyes. He’s piecing together what she’s given him so far and she’s certain she doesn’t like the conclusions he’s coming to. 

He looks to the gun, then answers. “SHIELD fell, years ago, after that mess with the Chitauri, Starks death, Fury’s dismissal. We kept up the persona of course, no need to scare the public, but then with the inhumans…” He grins, it’s all malice. She wants to punch his perfect teeth.

She considers what he’s said though. Inhumans exist still, SHIELD just doesn’t. And she works for Hydra, apparently.

A grip encloses around her wrist and she fires the gun on instinct. A bullet cracks through the window on the other side of the car as Ward smashes her wrist against the headrest. The gun clatters free from her grasp, falling beneath the seat. 

Daisy reaches forward and jerks the keys from the ignition, blocking the next punch he throws towards her face.

They both spill out of the car. 

Daisy goes over the hood, catching the door he’s pushed open and slamming it back shut, one of his legs caught in between. 

He cries out for just a moment before slamming the door back towards her, knocking it into her chest to put her off balance. It puts her back a step and gives him time to wretch himself free of the car. 

She throws one punch at him, then another, he blocks both. 

She’s fought this body before. Fought Ward himself a hundred times in her mind, replaying the takedown’s she’s seen from him, mixing that with the sparing sessions they used to have, once upon a time when he was her SO. She’s envisioned all the different ways to kill him, which would be easiest, which would hurt the most, which would be most satisfying. And even though this body is different, is not precisely hers, she still has memory engrained in her every move. 

Her next hit pushes him back a step. She uses the distance to whip one of her feet around, aiming for his chest. 

He catches it, shoves her backwards from her leg, and her shoulder blades crash into the car. 

She throws her hand out, carefully measuring the amount of force she extends, with the intention of sending him to the ground. Pinning him to the cracked concrete with an invisible weight piled onto his chest, immobilizing him to force out the answers she so desperately needs. 

Nothing happens. 

He gets a hit across her cheek; she can taste metal in her mouth that’s not quite blood. 

Right. 

No powers.

~~

It takes forever to properly dig herself out. Far longer than she expected really. The minutes tick by, each one raising the level of anxiety under her skin. She needs to get to Daisy, she needs to get to Fitz. Whatever alternate reality version of him that exists inside the framework can’t be doing well, not if he thinks she’s dead.

Finally, she’s lying flat on the grass, no longer in any kind of hole, exhausted. Her chest heaves, tacky sweat on her skin turns the dirt into mud, and for a whole single minute she can’t do anything but lie there.

Then she sits up, pushing herself to her feet and dusting some of the dirt off her pants in a futile effort towards cleanliness. She needs new clothes. All she’s got on are the pants and a not so white anymore cotton undershirt. No shoes, they were lost somewhere along the way up. There’s dirt in every crevice of her body. More than anything she wants a hot bath.

But they’re not here to play games. She needs to find Daisy. 

She glances back, looking over the pile of upturned dirt. Morbid curiosity draws her to the headstone inlaid in the sod. 

Jemma Anne Simmons  
Devoted Daughter and Loving Friend  
11 September 1987 – 

She brushes aside the leaves that cover her supposed death date. 

Oh.

8 November 2002

Maybe Fitz doesn’t need her so much after all.

~~

Her back shatters into the car door again, knocking a bit of breath from her lungs. The hand over her throat keeps her from drawing more in. 

“What have you done with Skye?” he growls at her, but his face is too close, his whole body is too close. He doesn’t see her as the opponent that she knows she is. She draws her knee up into his crotch with as much strength as she can muster. 

“Nothing.” She spits as his grip releases and he crumples to the ground. Planting her foot in the center of his chest she shoves him further to the ground. “She never even existed.”

Recovering, he reaches up and grabs her foot as it retreats. He wretches her whole leg. Pain flares in her knee and a cry bubbles up in her throat that she can’t staunch. 

She rips away from his grip and he’s back on his feet. 

They trade blows, each one matched against the other in a battle that could last endlessly. 

It only actually does last a minute before Daisy gets fed up.

She throws her body into his, bringing them both down hard against the concrete. A sickening smack signals his head hitting the ground. She brings her knee up to his jaw and it cracks under the blow, sinking him out of consciousness. 

Springing to her feet, she waits for the next blow. It doesn’t come. He’s out cold. 

“Great.” She kicks his ribs lightly but not that lightly, testing his consciousness. He doesn’t move.

She huffs to herself. “Now what?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> notable fact that (based on my math) realworld!fitzsimmons met at the academy in '03


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was sad that there wasn't an episode on tonight so I wrote a chapter. Thanks so much to everyone who's been reading and has responded to this fic! You guys are all so lovely and you make me want to write more of it!

Simmons makes her way to the edge of the cemetery. It looks familiar, but she can’t place it in her memory. The wide field is utterly empty of other living inhabitants. She’s grateful, she doesn’t know how she’d explain her current wardrobe situation. She really does need to find new clothes. 

Clouds bank over the sky and it’s dry but not particularly warm. Goosebumps raise on her skin as the breeze cools her lingering sweat. 

The end of the graves is signaled by a tall wrought iron fence that she slips between the bars of. Beyond it, the road is also desolate, not a car or pedestrian in sight. She catches a glance of something hanging on the fence a little way down the road and walks to it. The grass is rough against her bare feet. 

A brown leather coat hangs, slung over the vertical rail and Jemma hesitantly reaches out for it. The material is butter under her worn fingers. She picks it up, it’s not stealing if it’s not the real world, right? Besides, there’s no one in sight.

“Someone probably left it here, days ago, and won’t ever be coming back for it.” She says out loud to herself with another glance around. Still empty. 

The coat slides over her skin, it fits her shoulders perfectly. She slips her hands into the pockets, her fingers meet the surface of a phone and a key fob. First, she pulls out the phone. Its design is vaguely familiar but it’s not like anything she’s held before. She flips it over, there’s nothing identifying about it except a small FT and arrow on the back, and clicks the button. Nothing happens, its battery must be dead. 

There goes her plan of looking up a map. She takes out the keys next, clicking the unlock button instinctually. A vehicle chirps behind her. She whips around. Further down the road, from the direction she came, is a blue sedan. It’s parked on the side of the street, which she swore was empty. 

Jemma stares at the car. It’s not stealing if it’s in a simulation. 

She walks over, approaching the car, still utterly alone, and yanks open the left side door. The passenger side greets her, the steering wheel across the dash. 

Of bloody course she was buried in England. 

~~

Daisy kicks at the body again. Ward still is unconscious. He’s breathing fine though so she doesn’t figure she did too much damage. Not that she would lose any sleep over it if she had. 

Another plane roars overhead and she looks around. An empty strip of storefronts lay in front of the car and on the other side of the road beside them is a fenced off field, beyond which lays the airstrip. 

She can’t very well leave him here. He’d only wake up and find his way back to Hydra, then alert them all to, well, to whatever conclusion he’s come to about all this. It would send them looking for her, whatever his explanation, and that’s something she definitely doesn’t need. 

Daisy sighs heavily, anticipating her next move, and pops the trunk of the car.

~~

Jemma slams the car door shut with too much force. It rattles slightly in its frame. 

“Bloody hell.”

That’s why it looked familiar, because this is the same plot where her grandfather was buried when she was 19. Fitz had come with her to the funeral and she’d cried onto his shoulder the whole time. It had been the first time he’d ever come and met her family. 

Except the rendezvous point is in America, obviously, because they figured that’s where they’d be waking up. That’s where the base is at least, where most of SHIELD is and has generally been throughout its lifetime. But of course, in this timeline, she died before she joined up, before she ever heard of SHIELD probably. 

She can’t remember the precise date she got the letter and the man showing up at her doorstep Hogwarts style but it was sometime when she was 15. The date on the gravestone didn’t get her more than two months into being 15 in this universe. Her stomach turns slightly at the thought, unease that she hasn’t felt in years creeping under her skin. 

Jemma walks around to the back of the car and opens the trunk. If she’s going to abandoned her moral code, she might as well go all out. There’s a duffle bag and an emergency blanket and one of those things to scrape the ice off a windshield. She goes for the bag. Maybe it’s extra clothes, based on the jacket the real owner of this car happens to be about her size. 

Once again, her luck seems to have turned. She pulls out a clean pair of jeans, a couple of different t-shirts, and a pair of sneakers. After another cursory glance around, she decides that she really is alone here and quickly changes out of her grimy clothes.

She gets in the car, the right side this time, and turns the key. The engine hums quietly. A screen in the middle of the dash glows to life. Another FT logo appears, the same as on the back of the phone. She grabs a hairband from around the emergency break and ties her hair up onto her head. There’s no point in checking what she looks like in the mirror, she knows she’s a mess, there’s nothing that can be done about it. A cord hangs from the dash of the car and she plugs the phone into it to charge.

It takes her a moment of jabbing at the screen before she gets it to show the GPS. The software is different from anything that she’s encountered before, regardless of how familiar it feels. She’s fairly sure that there’s a little town not far from here. After the funeral, and resulting obligatory family argument, she and Fitz went for a walk. They ended up at a time coffee shop where she knew no one. It was a massive relief at the time. 

Putting the car in drive, she sets off. Thankfully it’s an automatic, she hasn’t driven in years now and she’s not sure that she could manage a manual transmission. It’s odd and uncomfortable to be behind the wheel after so many years off it. She never did like driving. 

The GPS guides her to the little town without any trouble. It’s fairly empty as well, even though it’s well approaching late afternoon. Part of her wonders what day it is, if they operate under the same calendar in the Framework as they do in the real world or if time just doesn’t exist here. 

Parking the car, she walks until she finds a Starbucks. It doesn’t take more than a minute, even though nothing showed up on the GPS. Frowning at the building that shouldn’t totally be there, she goes inside, orders herself a tea, and sits in the back corner so as not to attract attention. There’s a socket in the wall just beside her seat and she plugs in the phone again, turning it on. Thankfully, there’s no passcode locking it. 

She doesn’t look at anything before she opens the browser, figures even though this person’s current consciousness isn’t real, their personality is, at least somewhere, and that would be going over the line. Her heart is tumbling over itself in her chest as she doubts her plan. What is the likelihood?

But no, he’s bound to be remarkable in every universe. 

Figuring it’s at least a start, she types Leopold Fitz into the search bar. 

The massive response is instantaneous. The first hit is a Wikipedia page, then a technical website. After that there’s a string of articles, all touting ‘FitzTech’ in the headlines. She scrolls down, finds a picture of him, and gasps. 

It’s a portrait shot, just of him in a studio, wearing a suit, his blue tie making his eyes pop the way she loves. His posture is different, as is his smile, but it’s the eyes that she can’t get over. 

They’re not the eyes she fell in love with. 

They’re hard, not cold like the LMD, nor filled with pain as she’s seen them so many times before, just impersonal, unflinching. It’s the expression of a different man, not the one who’s been by her side for almost half her life now. 

The phone clatters out of her shaking fingers onto the table in front of her. His eyes stare up from it and she has to look away. Her breathing shudders. 

They were counting on him being the easy one, the one that they’d be able to wake up no problem. But maybe that was just the delusion of childhood fairy tales, and it isn’t the kiss after all that wakes Snow White. 

She takes a deep breath, then another. Maybe there will at least be a way to figure out where he is from the search results. She picks up the phone again, tapping the Wikipedia page open. 

_Leopold “Leo” Fitz (born August 19, 1987) is a Scottish, engineer, entrepreneur, businessman, inventor, and industrial designer. He is the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Fitz Technologies (FitzTech). Fitz is largely regarded as…_

‘Fitz Technologies’ links her to another Wikipedia page. 

_Fitz Technologies (FitzTech) is a Scottish multinational technology company headquartered in Oakland, California that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services._

Oakland. So she’s doesn’t just have to get to America, she’s got to get to California. 

She goes back to the previous page, scrolls down to the headings that surmise his life. It’s not quite of her own volition that she clicks open the one titled ‘Early Years’. She skims over the basic information that she already knew, which thankfully has stayed the same. She doesn’t stop skimming until she reaches the line that makes her heart stumble. 

_Fitz largely credits his success and work ethic to his father, saying, “My Dad’s always been my biggest supporter… who knows where I would have been without him, certainly not here that’s for sure.”_

Oh. Oh Fitz.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter comes to you at my great personal cost because I cut open the tip of my pointer finger yesterday and it still hurts to type. (kidding, mostly) Anyways, I've also been posting little snippets/sneak peeks on my tumblr (also @sinkingsidewalks) on the days that I don't have time to post full chapters so if you're interested go check that out! I hope you enjoy this one and thanks so much to everyone who's been taking time to review! It always makes me smile, I really appreciate it!

Jemma’s exhausted really, the day she’s had seems never ending, possibly because it actually is. The backwash of adrenalin can still be felt under her skin, even though it wasn’t this body that experienced it. Her eyes still feel heavy from sobbing into Daisy’s shoulder once they were safe, and alone, on the Zephyr. Add digging herself out of a grave on top of that and her body feels shot, not even to mention her emotions. 

So it’s not a surprise when she drops off to sleep immediately once she’s in her seat on the train. Even before the wheels starts rolling down the track she’s slipping out of consciousness, her cheek against the glass window. 

Jemma dreams of Elena, of the Zephyr. She’s outside her own body, watching them watch over her and Daisy, watching her own vitals drop. They slip lower and lower until one of the monitors calls it too low and start an alarm. 

“No!” Elena says to one of the agents who moves towards Jemma’s body. “Leave her, there’s nothing we can do.”

The numbers cascade down, the beeping accelerates, the inhabitants of the room watch. Jemma tries to say something, but can’t. She tries to do anything at all, but she’s stuck, is merely a presence. All she can do is watch as her heartrate slows to a crawl, watch the blips on the line spread further and further apart, watch until it is a beat away from halting completely. 

She wakes with a start, just before the final beat, shaking, a tremble running through her that she can’t control. The man in the seat across is staring at her, the expression on his face not quite concern. She gives him a small, hopefully reassuring smile and checks her watch. More than an hour has passed even though it barely felt like thirty seconds in her dream. She shudders again, and her fingers go to the pulse on her wrist. It’s still there. She wonders if it wouldn’t be if her real body dies. 

The train she’s on is headed to London because by some miracle of coincidence, Fitz is coming to her. During her extensive online stalking of him she found that he’s due to speak at a summit in London this evening. Which, temporarily, solves her problem of trying to fly internationally as someone who’s considered legally dead.

After she’d figured out a plan for getting to Fitz, she’d started looking for Daisy. There had been nothing in the news about Quake, although lots of other things about inhumans, and a cursory search for Daisy Johnson had only lead to an author and a couple of random twitter profiles. Nothing that seemed in any way related to her Daisy. 

She’d put out a couple of feelers anyways, tapped in to some of the places where she hopes Daisy will look. The plan had been, upon their arrival, to meet up immediately, but Simmons thinks now that divide and conquer might be a more realistic scenario. 

She pulls the phone out again to check if there’s been any hits but she’s out of service range. Turning the thing over in her hand, she sighs and traces over the logo with her thumb. That’s why the operating system was so familiar to her even though she’d never used it before. It was Fitz’s software, his style. It had his metaphorical fingerprints all over it and she’d recognize his work, his mind, anywhere. Even in this universe where it had no input from her own. 

Who knows what she’s going to say to him when she gets there, _if_ she can even get close enough to say _something._ She doesn’t know what the security’s going to be like even though she’s counting on being able to waltz past it so long as the dress she bought is short enough. That thought makes her stomach turn. She hates that Radcliffe has done this to them, has made him into something he’s not. 

Shaking herself from her thoughts, the man is staring again and it’s not a good look, she opens the phone to a couple of articles she saved. They’re all on inhumans, naturally, they seem to be as big a topic here as they are in the real world. Except here the bias is shifted remarkably towards hatred, towards fear. It doesn’t settle well with her. 

Simmons doesn’t close the phone again until the train is pulling into Victoria Stations and she’s gathering the small bag she put together back North – using a stolen credit card, but that’s not really an issue. 

It’s time to find Fitz, whoever that may be. 

~~

The phone chimes in the cup holder as Daisy cruises down the highway but the alert comes up on the dash of the car, shifting the map she had on that screen to the corner. 

“Oh, cool.” She taps it to expand it, pulls up the website that pinged the alert. 

It’s one of the back alleys that she set up years ago, when Simmons was in Hydra – their world’s Hydra – and wanted a way that Daisy could reach her in case something happened with Fitz. Because they both knew that, at that time, Coulson would never risk the Op. 

It’s a miracle the page is still there, or at least evidence that some things from their world ended up here by accident, but if someone’s tapping in on it, it has to be Jemma. Which is good because they’ve been in here for almost a day now and all Daisy’s done is knock out her evil ex- _whatever_ – he was never her boyfriend, she’s convinced herself of that.

She types out a response - encoded of course, just because - as the car drives and includes the phone number of the new phone she stopped for an hour earlier. The old one, the Hydra one, she pulled the metadata from then drove over in the airport parking lot. There’s no need for all this cloak and dagger bullshit, she doesn’t think at least. 

There’s a heavy bang from the back of the car. Daisy glances into the rear view mirror and grins, turning up the radio. 

~~

Jemma is correct in her estimation that the dress will get her into the party after the talk. It gets her into the talk too, which is _interesting._ He still talks like Fitz, her Fitz, even though this one is a bit more charismatic, a bit more at ease. Fitz has always been good at public speaking, despite his shyness. 

So it’s not unfamiliar to her for him to be standing on a stage prattling on about technological advancements and the future investments of his company. Even though in most situations nowadays she’d be right up there alongside him, inserting the second half of her sentences into the first half of his. He sounds good, always does really, and the talk leaves everyone in the room chattering about what he said as they’re corralled towards a different room with a bar. 

Seeing his face is a small amount of agony and having it be not _quite_ her Fitz adds to that. The last time she saw him, or something that looked like him, was when she was stabbing him in the throat, when she watched the life drain from his eyes. It was robotic life, manufactured, not actually him, but she knows it’ll haunt her nonetheless.

When she catches a glance of him across the room she didn’t quite expect it to hurt this much. Obviously she knew it would be painful, she tried to prepare for any possibility of what, or who, she’d be approaching. Based on her death date, it was pretty obvious he wouldn’t know her. 

But to look into his eyes and find no recognition there, it wrenches her heart from her chest. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen it before, even back when they were shy teenagers at the academy, he knew who she was before the reverse. He watched her, even back then, a careful inquisition in his eyes, one that she originally pegged as competition.

This though, this is the intrigue of a stranger on the street. 

It’s worse because she’s become so accustomed to his gaze. She’s familiar with every facet of it, the glowing awe when she gets to a solution first, the joy when they work a theory, back and forth, the warmth there when he tells her he loves her, the heat as he kisses her, as he works open the buttons of her shirt, his hands on her bare skin. 

She can still see the worry in his eyes when he told her to be careful in the basement of that submarine base. Worry born of love and need and the too many times that the universe has crossed out their path. It was the last thing the real him said to her, she hadn’t realized it until they were on the Zephyr, on their way towards Elena, but that’s the last time she truly saw _him._

The problem is, despite it all, she can see his appeal. However foreign his gaze is it still sends butterflies whirling in her stomach, still sends a rush of heat to her chest. He’s still Fitz, even with the cocky smile and the slightly too Hitler youth-esque hair style, she’s still attracted to him. And, based on his expression, the feeling is entirely mutual. 

Oh, how Daisy would kill her if she slept with him like this. 

But she won’t. Can’t, really. But also won’t. 

When he catches her staring back though, she smiles, inviting and he slides his way across the room, a glass of liquor in his hand which she knows he hates. 

He holds out his hand, a light in his eyes. “Leo Fitz.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry not sorry for the cliffhanger. Hopefully the next chapter will be up tomorrow!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is a day later than I said it'd be, I couldn't get the voices in my head to cooperate yesterday. (But I did manage to write another episode tag thing instead oops)  
> Also, we will be getting back into more Daisy stuff soon, and I think that the fic will sorta hold this pattern of a couple of Daisy centered chapters then a couple of Jemma ones etc.  
> I hope you enjoy!

“Leo Fitz,” he holds out his hand and she shakes it. It’s warm and strong and completely familiar to her, maybe minus a couple of callouses. Her breath is stuck in her throat. His smile is not his own. There’s no similarity to the shy sixteen year old who stuck out his hand and muttered ‘Fitz’ to her. 

“Jemma Simmons.” She watches his face carefully but there’s nothing there. Her heart sinks a little lower in her chest. “Biochemist.”

“Have we met before?” His eyes linger over her face and her heart stumbles over itself in her chest. “You look familiar.”

“Perhaps.” She smiles, she doesn’t want to scare him off, give too much away and have him recoil. If she’s going to do this properly she’ll have to ease him into the idea that this isn’t his real life. 

A blink later the expression is gone, replaced by the devilish grin he wears in every photo. “No, I would have remembered someone as beautiful as you.”

Her heart unclenches, sinks to the floor, she tries to smile at the compliment but can’t quite. His hand reaches out again, touching the bare skin of her forearm in a gesture that is entirely unfamiliar. 

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Yes.” She feels more like crying than she has in days, the weight on her chest magnifies, her heart aches. The stranger across from her smiles. “That’d be lovely.”

~~

Daisy pulls the car over and parks on an empty residential street a few block away from the school. It’s not a great area and it’s the middle of the day, so thankfully there’s literally no one in sight. There’s a bang from inside the trunk as the engine shuts off, a single protest. 

She rolls her eyes to herself, gets out of the vehicle, and bangs back once on the lid of the trunk.

“Hey!” he yells from inside. 

“Shut up and listen to me.” A momentary pause tells her that he is actually going to. It was a long enough drive that she worked out a plan for this. “This is not what you think it is, like seriously, this is so beyond your imagination, that you’re not going to want to believe me. But trust me, I’m telling you the truth.” There’s still no response, so either he’s passed out because the trunk really is air tight – which she doubts – or he’s giving her the benefit of the doubt – which also seems unlikely.

But maybe he’s a different version of Ward, that’s what she’s banking on at least. 

“Do you know what the multiverse theory is?”

There’s more silence then a tentative, “Yeah.”

“Well I’m from a different universe. I’m not the Skye you went to bed with last night. I don’t even go by that name anymore where I’m from, but I am still _her_.” It’s a gross oversimplification of the facts, but hopefully it’s basic enough that he’ll buy into it, and help her out. Possibly. This Ward seems to at least genuinely care about her, she saw evidence of that in the apartment, unlike the one in her world.

He thinks about it; she can almost hear him. 

“I’m listening.”

“In my world we work for SHIELD, there isn’t any Hydra anymore, you, you switched sides when they fell.” She figures that telling him in the real world he’s dead – several times over – is probably not the best way to win his trust. Better to make him out the hero. “You saved my life in the fight.” And milk it, because this is Ward. 

“So that’s why I freaked out earlier, when I realized we work for Hydra here. But now I need your help.”

Another pause. 

“You knocked me out and locked me in this trunk for hours and now you’re expecting me to _help_ you?”

“Please, Grant.” The begging makes her mildly ill. “Something went wrong, in the lab, something that I don’t understand, but now I’m stuck here and my friends are too, but they don’t know it. I don’t think they do at least, and I need to get back.”

She pauses, breathes and lets him breathe. 

“I just want to get back to my Ward so you can get back to your Skye.” And she wants to gag, feels physically sick at the thought of it all. 

But it sells it. He heaves through a sigh then pauses only for a few seconds. 

“What do you need me to do?”

~~

“So, Biochemistry, huh? Don’t see a lot of that around here.”

“Yes, well, I’ve been working on a, thought experiment, shall we say, that could use some help from an expert like yourself.” Flattery, apparently, will get her everywhere, that’s what she’s learned over the past few hours that they’ve been talking. It had started out with her prodding questions about his new software but, like all of their conversations, had digressed to pure science talk. It’s an easy habit to slip into and it makes the differences seem as if they’ve disappeared.

It was never their fields that drew them together. He’s engineering and she’s biochemistry, they’re not the two most compatible areas. But rather it was always a more intrinsic quality of their minds, something she’s never quite been able to define, that makes their intelligences exponentiate rather than combine. It’s not something she’d ever experienced before, when they first met at the Academy, and not something she’s come across since, but it’s the same here nonetheless.

“Well I’m certainly interested.”

He’s made that abundantly clear considering how every other person who’s approached him to talk he’s dismissed after a few pleasantries. 

“What’s the nature of this thought experiment?” He shifts closer, regardless of the fact that he’s been invading her personal space all evening.

She glances around the room. It’s busy still even though their host has been preoccupied. 

“It’s a bit _sensitive_ , more akin to your _other_ work.” All night he’s been hinting at the fact that the company is not all he does, that the thing basically runs itself and all he has to do is throw a few ideas its way every few months. That his real science is much more complex than the things he puts his name on. She hopes that she’s not wrong in her assumptions, hopes that she really is reading the emotions on his face correctly as easily as she usually does.

He looks even more interested. “And your employer?”

“I’m working for myself at the moment.”

“Well then, consider me intrigued.” He grins but this one isn’t seductive and glances at his watch. It’s a Rolex, bright gold and covered in ostentatious diamonds. “My plane leaves for America in an hour, I’ve got to get back to New York to repeat this nightmare.” He waves a hand around the room, then plucks the glass of wine she’s been nursing all night from her fingers, leaving it on a table. “Come with me. I can show you around my lab and we can discuss your experiment.”

Her heart stutters and she hesitates. “And the conditions of this generosity, Mr. Fitz?”

“Absolutely none whatsoever, beyond what you choose to initiate, of course.” He holds out his hand, she aches to take it. “Are those amenable conditions, Dr. Simmons?”

She swallows, “I suppose they are, yes.” 

“Brilliant.” He grins his Fitz grin and reaches for her hand. “But first, I’m starving, they never serve anything proper at these things. What do you say to takeout?”

“Perfect.”

Her fingers slip through his, cool against warm and for a second there’s a flash of hesitancy across his face. He stares into her eyes again, like he did when they first met, and her heart jumps for a moment. But it’s gone as soon as it arrived, and without another glance he’s pulling her through the crowd, their fingers tangled together.


	7. Chapter 7

Daisy walks through the school hallway with Ward on her tail against the rush of students. The final bell of the day must have just rung, causing a cascade of teenagers fleeing the building. They move around her, don’t bother glancing at her in typical teenage fashion, as she makes her way to room 301. Coulson’s classroom. 

By the time she reaches the third floor the hallway’s cleared out completely. The school might as well be abandoned for all the life it shows. Most of the classroom doors are shut, the rooms plunged into darkness. She hopes Coulson isn’t one of those teachers who’s out the door before the students. 

“Who is this guy again?” Ward asks and she shushes him. She left the gun in the car, mostly because she wasn’t sure she’d be able to supress the urge to shoot him once he started talking. It was a good instinct. 

The door to 301 is open, but she knocks on it anyways. 

“Mr. Coulson?” she calls as she steps in to the lit room. 

“Hi.” He’s sat behind a cluttered desk, papers everywhere, a clunky computer modem shoved to one side under a stack of reports. “Can I help you with something?”

“Mr. Coulson!” she gushes, “I’m Daisy, Daisy Johnson, but you might remember me as Skye. I was in your fourth period natural history class like five years ago now. Seriously, that class, like, changed my life, it was so good. You’ve gotta remember me.”

He looks at her for a moment with absolutely no recognition, just for a moment, then his face shifts. Standing, he walks around his desk, expression still undefinable. 

His face falls into his lying smile. 

“Of course I remember you, Skye, or Daisy you said it is now?”

He hugs her. 

He’s got no idea who she is. 

~~

Against her better judgement, Jemma gets on the plane. Or rather, the jet, which it’s not really. It’s got the body of a private jet, but the wings of something closer to the quinjet except longer and thinner, and a pointed bug nose like a spaceship. All together it doesn’t quite look like it should be able to fly.

“Your work?” She nods to the machine as they stand on the tarmac in typically British not-quite-rain. Everything glows under the too-bright lights. 

He grins, broad and unabashed, then nods. “Let me show you around.”

~~

Daisy really didn’t expect him to recognize her. All the research she’d done of him prior, which was really just some intense googling and hacking into a couple of private Facebook pages, suggested that he no longer had anything to do with SHIELD, or in this universe, Hydra.

But he keeps a hand on her shoulder as he releases her from the hug nonetheless. Of course Coulson wouldn’t just be a teacher, he’d be a _good_ teacher, the kind she never actually got to experience. 

“So, what brings you back then, Daisy?”

“Well, I’ve been living down in Florida the past couple years but Grant,” she motions to Ward, struggles through the familiarity of the name, “And I are driving up for his sister’s wedding and I thought it’d be fun to stop by some of my old spots, show him where I grew up. Obviously you were first on our list, Mr. Coulson.”

“Well consider me flattered, I’m glad I made such a lasting impression. It’s so good to see you again. I’m sorry I don’t have more time to catch up but we’ve got a staff seminar, and I’m afraid I’m already late.” He stretches his hand out to Ward, and they shake. Then he starts shuffling them out of the classroom.

“Oh that’s no problem, we’ll get out of your way, I just wanted to come see how you were doing, that you were still teaching here.”

“I wouldn’t be anywhere else. It was lovely to see you again, Skye.” 

“You too, Mr. C.” Daisy says softly.

He lays his hand back on her arm briefly before locking the classroom and starting off down the hall, leaving Daisy and Ward standing.

“Well that was a waste of time.” Ward says once Coulson is out of hearing range. 

Daisy sighs, blinks, watches Coulson’s figure until it disappears around the corner at the end of the hall. “No, now I know. We’ll have to get to May first.”

“May?” Ward turns to her. “You don’t mean the Cavalry?”

Daisy grimaces. Oh, this day just keeps getting better. 

~~

Leading her by the hand, Fitz shows her every aspect of the plane. He goes over wing detail, engine design, the software that he developed for the autopilot, all while the pilots are readying for takeoff. Then, once a man in a suit approaches him and tells him it’s time, he guides her to the back of the plane where there’s a closed off room with two wide sofas. He sits across from her.

“There’s a network that you can use if you need to get in contact with someone. If your phone’s FitzTech it should connect automatically. The seatbelts are mostly just for legal’s sake but you can wear one if you want. It’s not strictly necessary because the lack of in-flight turbine engines makes dramatic altitude shifts less likely.”

Jemma sits back and doesn’t reach for the belt. “Of course, turbulence would be almost non-existent in flight based off dynamic reaction because the aircraft-“

“-Works with the air currents rather than against them.” He finishes for her, then pauses for a moment, contemplates her. “You know you’re the first person I’ve ever met who seems to understand me the first time.”

“Yes,” she replies quietly, only able to smile to him weakly. “I know the feeling.”

Shaking them from the moment, she brings her hand together in her lap. “So why have you never manufactured them publicly? I can imagine that an almost eco-friendly jet would have a pretty wide market range.”

He sinks back, shaking his head. “Too expensive. The engines alone run more than even most billionaires would spend on a plane. Then add in the materials for the outer frame and the flight console which I had to build personally. We’d spend a killing making them and have no overhead.”

“You have the only one then?”

He nods. “Makes maintenance a pain in the ass, I have to do it all myself.”

She smiles. “Somehow I doubt you mind.” He always has loved engines, tinkering with them, making them capable of things other people thought weren’t possible. It’s why the Zephyr is so advanced. 

“No, I don’t suppose I do.” His expression matches hers and he leans forward, pressing his forearms against his knees. “But enough about my projects, I want to hear about yours.”

~~

Daisy’s phone buzzes in her back pocket and she turns half away from Ward to read it. A text from a new number sits in the inbox. 

_With Fitz. On our way to you._

She sighs, at least that’s one less complication to deal with. Pocketing the phone again, she turns back to Ward. 

“You were saying _what_ about Agent May?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a short one today, but I hope you enjoy. And I just want to say thanks to everyone who's been commenting/leaving kudos/reading this story. Your love really makes my day.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two weeks down, four to go!

The plane takes off and settles into remarkably smooth flight. Only then does Fitz start to press her for information, after she’s put away her phone from texting Daisy.

“So?” he leans forward, elbows on his knees, halving the space between them. 

“Right, yes, the thought experiment.” She’s sort of thought this through, has at least figured out what she’s _not_ going to tell him. What she hasn’t totally sorted through is what she is. 

“I’m working on creating a simulation experience that could mimic and be believed as reality.”

“Like VR.” 

“Yes but not just visual, a total sensory experience, complete with touch, taste, via direct-current stimulation to the brain.”

“To fool the senses into believing that the input in real,” he fills in and she nods her agreement. 

Fitz sits back, his hand scratching down the side of his cheek. The expression on his face is absolutely identical to the one she’s used to when he’s working out a problem.

“How very… inception.” He’s not looking at her anymore, is considering the ceiling of the plane like it holds the answers to life itself. Or maybe just to her ideas. 

“A total sensory experience,” he muses, “complete with every sensation of the human experience.”

“Yes, it wouldn’t just stop at the main five.”

He hums. “But once you tapped into one it would be easy to get the others as well, balance, temperature.” He looks back at her, a particular expression on his face that she can’t quite define or understand. “Pain.”

“Yes.”

“With the right architecture, the implementations would be endless. You could relive a childhood memory in perfect detail, attend your lectures from anywhere, visit Rome without having to bother with an airplane.” He strokes his hand over his chin and meets her gaze. 

“Train an army without ever leaving a bruise.”

“Yes.” She answers again, because she knows where his mind is, where it’s going, the familiar paths it’s trekking, and she wants him to follow those, to lead himself back to reality. 

He nods, like he agrees, with what she doesn’t know, but turns his gaze back to the ceiling to think. After a few moments he speaks again.

“You’d need some massive hardware to handle the poly count, I don’t even know if _I_ have anything with that kind of CPU.”

“I’ve got that covered.”

Now he looks intrigued.

“Friends in high places?”

“Something like that.” Jemma grimaces. “What I need your mind for is the hardware. I’ve hit a wall on the transcranial apparatus, I’m not a mechanic you see.”

He pauses, just for a moment, then stands and jogs over to his briefcase, pulls out a tablet. When he sits back down it’s beside her rather than across from her. 

“So you’ll need eyewear and earwear, yeah? Then I assume that you’re hoping to be able to get rid of them once you’ve mapped brain response to different environments, so something temporary and malleable.” He starts sketching across the screen with a pen, drawing up designs that are almost identical to the ones she saw him make months ago, when he was creating this for the first time. 

“Yeah, that’s right, Mr. Fitz.” Smiling softly, she watches him work and ignores the ache in her chest. 

“Oh please, just Fitz. Mr. Fitz is my Dad.”

“Of course, Fitz.” Her expression flickers and he notices but doesn’t comment, is once again immediately distracted by his own thoughts. 

Her only hope now is that this sparks something, brings forth a memory that the Framework couldn’t quite supress. If that doesn’t happen, she’s not sure what she’ll do.

~~

They’re walking now, in a fairly dilapidated park, Daisy paces a foot to Ward’s left, careful to maintain enough distance between them should he get any ideas about a rematch.

“So May works for Hydra?” Daisy can’t quite reconcile the May she knows, who, despite her stony exterior, cares deeply for the whole team, who trained her, took her under her wing, after the whole Ward fiasco, with one that would work for Hydra. But then again, things _are_ different here.

“If you’re talking about Melinda May, also known as the Cavalry, then yeah. She heads our division now.”

Daisy bites her lip. They should be driving up to New York, to meet up with FitzSimmons, but she doesn’t quite trust herself to get behind the wheel of a vehicle right now, even one that seems to self-correct.

“You’re sure?” It’s obvious that Ward would work for Hydra, she hadn’t even thought to be relieved when she realized that Coulson had nothing to do with them, but May? It doesn’t make sense. Yet somehow it also does. She thinks that might scare her more. 

“Yes.”

She sighs, stops in her tracks and works on getting a grip on her emotions. If this were the real world, things would be trembling. She hopes her real body isn’t betraying her emotion in the way this one can’t. That would be a very unwelcome surprise for Elena.

She gets her head back in place. 

“How do I find her?”

“We didn’t show up when she called us in, bets are she’ll find you.”

~~

Jemma falls asleep somewhere over the Atlantic. Fitz had fallen silent hours ago, still hunched over the tablet, only muttering things to himself under his breath every once in a while. She’d moved to sit by a window, to watch the wing glide through the clouds with little aide from an engine. It was so quiet, so peaceful, feeling like the two of them were the only ones in the whole universe able to see anything at all. She’d made three cups of tea in an attempt not to doze off.

The dream is much the same as the last one. She’s outside her body, looking down on the scene without being able to interact with anything at all. The numbers on the monitors start to drop again. Heart rate, blood pressure, all slipping lower and lower while she can only watch. 

The others can only watch as well; they converge to hover around her unconscious body.

“Again?” one of the agents asks. 

“That’s twice in less than an hour.” Agent Piper says. 

Less than an hour? It’s been half a day since she fell asleep on the train, from her perspective at least. She supposes that it should have been fairly obvious that time would move differently between the two realities. Or has she flat lined more times than she’s aware of and these moments of unconsciousness are the only ones she’s been able to notice?

“I would have thought that they’d have more time,” the pilot chimes in. The Zephyr must be on autopilot, though where they’re heading is a complete question. They won’t know until she and Daisy wake up, hopefully with a location from the others. 

“If she keeps crashing…” he continues. And he’s right, her body will only be able to take this so many times before it fails completely, before her heart won’t be able to restart. 

The numbers are slipping more slowly this time, perhaps because she’s not in as deep a sleep. She can still hear Fitz muttering to himself across the room, feel the warm air from the vents being pumped into the body of the plane, the cushion beneath her shoulder. 

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now.” Elena steps forward from where she was leaning against the wall, in the shadows. “We just have to hope that they get to our people before time runs out.”

Then she feels a jolt, like the plane has just lost altitude, like her stomach dropping out from under her on a roller coaster, and a burning pain in her chest, around her lungs. The numbers on the monitor flat line. The incessant beeping turns to an alarm. 

Her body jolts into awareness, every cell in her feels as if it’s been electrified. Her heart aches in her chest and her fingertips feel almost numb. She tries to breathe. 

The plane is dimmer than when she fell asleep, the stars are more visible beyond the glass, they must have moved out of the cloud bank they were in. Fitz works in the corner, the glow of the screen he’s still working on the only light in the room.

She presses her palm against her breastbone and can feel the thunder of her heart beneath the skin.

They’re going to get out of this alive. They have to.

Pulling out her phone, she sends Daisy another message, her heart still racing in her chest. 

_Stay awake. Whatever you do, don’t go to sleep._


	9. Chapter 9

Fitz doesn’t speak again, except to ask a few details of information or input for his design, until they hear the engines come back online again and the plane starts to descend. That, at least, seems to break him from his ‘deep focus’ as she sometimes like to think of it as. It happens, has always happened, when he’s got a new big idea. He loses touch with the world for a little while. She knows she does it too sometimes. 

“So, I’ll start developing the prototype for you to see as soon as possible, but I’m thinking that a simple piece of headwear will do, at least to start, then we can assess the further needs of the software.”

He prattles on, about all the detail of the schematics, all the things she’s heard him go over before. It’s odd, to be sitting having an almost identical conversation under completely different circumstances. And he’s none the wiser it seems. 

Finally, she just has to cut him off. She lays a hand on his forearm, looking at the tablet. “Yes, yes Fitz it looks perfect.” It looks identical to the one he built, in the real world, even though he’s only had the idea in this version of his mind for a few hours. 

“Alright then, why don’t you-“

“Fitz.”

He stops his rambling and looks at her properly. She wishes that she could see some degree of familiarity in his eyes.

“Due to the potential, I suppose, of this project I would appreciate if-“

“I kept it to myself, yeah. That’s not a problem.” He grins, a glint in his eyes, “Just between us then?”

Simmons nods. “And I’ve got a friend who’s good with code working on the architecture.” She hopes that Daisy will be able to fake it well enough.

He taps a few buttons on the tablet then slides it over to her. “Just write down the best way for me to get in contact with you and I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve got the designs worked out then.”

The plane glides smoothly down to the ground, landing on the runway with little more than a bump. Jemma peers out the window again. 

“This is a very impressive piece of machinery you’ve got, Fitz. I hope together we can achieve a similar caliber.” 

“Everything I make is remarkable.” He grins and the jet comes to a stop. Reaching out, he takes her hand and guides her back through the plane, then down the stairs to the tarmac. There’s already a car parked waiting, Daisy standing, hanging over it. 

“It was lovely to meet you, Jemma Simmons, Biochemist.” He holds out his hand again, like he did in London, which simultaneously feels as if it were hours ago and seconds ago. The warp of time is getting odd, the more she thinks of it the more present it becomes.

“You as well, Fitz.” It’s hard to shake his hand with this chasm between them, when she’s so used to him being right at her side.

“How fortuitous it was that I could make it in time to speak last night, or else I suppose we never would have met.”

Her brow furrows in confusion and he notices.

“You didn’t know? I wasn’t even supposed to speak in London yesterday but a schedule changed last minute.”

“Yes, I suppose,” Jemma smiles. “How fortuitous indeed.”

Another car pulls onto the tarmac, a sleek black town car with windows so tinted they might as well be solid and he releases her hand to step towards it. 

“I look forward to hearing from you.”

This grin is his playboy grin, the new one she’s come to identify and hate. “I look forward to working with you, Jemma.”

Her name sounds impossibly wrong from these lips. 

She nods. “Talk soon.”

Retreating to Daisy’s car is a blessing and she has to stop herself from running across the tarmac. 

Daisy stands in the open driver’s side door of a silver mid-size sedan peering out across the dimming airfield. Her hair’s longer, and she’s not wearing the dramatic eye makeup she’s be favouring lately but it’s still Daisy, and she looks at Jemma with the right eyes. The relief is instantaneous. 

Jemma approaches the car, throws open the passenger side door. 

“Hey-“

She cuts herself off. There’s a body in the backseat. 

Grant Ward’s body.

~~

Daisy drops the grin from her lips. “Right, yeah, I was gonna tell you about that. He’s still evil but he’s not that evil.”

“And is he…?”

“What dead?” She laughs a little, it’s not like she hasn’t been tempted. “No, I just gave him a concussion earlier so he’s passed out.” 

“And he’s…” Daisy waits while Jemma sorts out the right word. “Safe?”

“As safe as any Grant Ward can be.”

Simmons nods and gets in the car, apparently trusting her word is enough.

They drive along the dark highway, headlights casting beams along the road, and debrief. Filling Simmons in is easy, just a relay of facts, but the information she pulls from Jemma doesn’t come as smoothly. The circumstance with Fitz is, undesirable, to understate it. 

Once they get through the basics of everything that’s happened to each of them that day, they get into Daisy’s plan. 

“Think about it Simmons, it’s _May_ , there’s no way that we’ll find her on our own, not without Coulson to help. The fastest way to do this is for her to catch up to us.”

“And if she kills us before we have a chance to talk to her? This is Hydra after all.” 

Daisy makes a face, it’s a reasonable concern – this is Simmons after all – but based on what Jemma told her of her dreams, Daisy doesn’t think they have a lot of time to spare doing things the safe way. 

“It’s a manageable risk. If I’m, or Skye me, is on her team then maybe she’ll ask questions before she starts shooting. Plus, we can always use Ward as a dead man, technically he already is one.”

“So your plan is to go to a sketchy motel and hope that May’s got access to the tracking software in this car?”

“Well, we could always go to a nice hotel but I’m short on cash and I feel like that would draw some unwanted attention.”

Simmons contemplates to herself and Daisy goes back to actually driving the car. 

“You do know that since May has been in here the longest there’s a fair chance that she’ll be the hardest to pull out.”

“I know.” Daisy stares down the line of the highway, watches the white flecks disappear beside her side mirror. 

“And we have no idea what kind of shape her body will be in, even if we do convince her. She certainly shouldn’t be waking up alone in a dangerous environment, regardless of the long term consequences of the Framework.”

“I know Simmons, but think about it, May is the most skeptical, the most free-thinking.”

“She’s also the most stubborn,” Jemma mutters, “discounting you.”

Daisy grins, and elbows Jemma in the side of the arm. 

“I knew you’d agree with me.”

Simmons rolls her eyes. “I _am_ voicing my concern that this is going to get one of us killed.”

“Yeah,” she sighs, “But it’ll be Ward, and I can live with that.”

It’s just unfortunate she won’t be able to do it herself.

~~

Once they get to the motel and check themselves into a room, Ward promptly falls back asleep.

“How hard did you hit him?” Jemma asks, examining the bruise forming.

“I didn’t think it was _that_ hard.” Daisy says from across the room, peering around the crusty curtain covering the room’s one window. “But I wasn’t particularly concerned with his higher brain function when I did.”

Jemma chuckles lightly then sits in the totally uncomfortable armchair. Something in her mind is being pieced together but she’s not sure what it is yet. Daisy grumbles about Ward taking up the whole bed but sits up on the dresser comfortably, her back against the wall, facing the door. 

“Do things,” Jemma pauses, contemplates the terrible piece of art on the wall across from her gaze. “Do things seem like they’ve been a little too easy for us lately?”

Daisy regards her. “No,” emphatically said. 

Jemma shakes her head, just slightly. “No, I don’t mean that, I just mean…” she bites her lip. “Don’t you think we’ve come across a few too many coincidences while we’ve been here?”

Daisy frowns harder. “No?”

“But, I mean,” Simmons continues, ignoring her, “Think about it, my finding someone who’s conveniently left their car and keys outside the cemetery, Fitz being invited to speak in London last minute-“

“The traffic near the bridge,” Daisy adds, “It appeared from nowhere just as I needed it to then disappeared just as fast.”

“Precisely.” Simmons wavers her hands. “So if the framework is in our minds, is based off of our minds, then maybe in a way we’re manipulating it, or manipulating our own outcomes at least. That would certainly be useful if it’s true.”

“What? Like click my heels and wish for Kansas?” Daisy scoffs.

“Maybe,” she sighs, “I don’t know.”

“Well what does that mean? In the long run, if it were true?”

Probably bad things, that’s her gut response anyways. But she doesn’t know. This is totally untested technology that was built off of what basically amounts to a magic book. Jemma isn’t sure there’s anything here that she can be sure of. 

“I don’t know.” She tucks one of her knees up on the chair to prop her chin onto. What she really needs is to talk to Fitz about it, but he’s not particularly available at the moment. “But we definitely need to be careful with what we do.”

Who knows what they could change, without even realizing it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey look, plot!


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a couple days! Sorry! Updates are going to get less frequent unfortunately though because I'm moving this week (but yay moving!)  
> Also, sorry if there are more mistakes in this one than normal, I've got a killer headache but I wanted to get it up tonight.

The night passes. Ward sleeps and Jemma and Daisy stay up, alternating between scouring the internet on their phones and staring blankly at the walls. It’s too cheap a motel to have a TV, Jemma doesn’t know if the addition of one would make the boredom better or worse. If May doesn’t show up soon they’re going to have to rethink their plan.

She gets a couple of texts from Fitz around two in the morning telling her a prototype should be ready for her to see by the middle of the afternoon. They agree to meet at his home lab upstate. After some arguing, Daisy agrees to let her go alone if they haven’t found May yet. 

“Why am I hungry?” Daisy sucks one finger into her mouth, ridding it of powdered sugar while her other hand skims across the box of donuts, searching for another. They’re from one of those extra fancy shops that has more social media followers than customers and a name with some kind of food related pun in it. Daisy procured the box as they were walking back to the motel, – after a not so subtle attempt to draw May out - claiming the need for comfort food, even though Simmons is pretty sure she just likes the sugar rush.

“Because what you’re eating has absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever,” Simmons mumbles as she flips through the newspaper. It’s a longshot but they’re looking for news – any news – on Hydra and since Ward said they’re out of the shadows, the four different newspapers this place keeps in the lobby seemed like a good place to start. “It’s pure sugar, which, studies are showing is more addicting than many illegal stimulants. Are you going to help?”

Daisy ignores her. “No, like, I’m not a real body, I’m just an avatar, so why am I hungry?”

Oh. “You feel pain, don’t you?”

“Yeah, Ward’s punch hurt like a bitch.”

Simmons pauses, only continuing when Daisy doesn’t catch on to where her thoughts are headed. “Well I suppose it’s the same principle. Physical sensations heighten the reality of the illusion. It’s far simpler to make someone feel hungry than it is to erase the instinct that they need to eat.”

“Huh.” Daisy finally chooses another donut. “Does that mean I’m gonna get my period too? Because what’s the point of a fake reality if you have to deal with all the shitty parts of real reality?”

She hadn’t thought about that. It raises a larger question than Daisy probably realizes. Are these bodies, which feel real, but aren’t real, capable of change, of progression? Could they get pregnant? Would their bodies age along with the child’s? 

If they had stumbled into a different reality of the framework, would she have found herself somewhere other than a grave? Perhaps in a cottage in the countryside, warm from the fire, with a ring on her finger and a daughter in her arms. Or a son, she’s not picky. 

She shakes herself from the daydream. “Theoretically yes, all of your body systems will function as they would in the real world.” Simmons looks up from the papers, Daisy’s face has scrunched up in displeasure. “I’m hoping we’re not in here long enough to find out.” It’s only been a day but they’re still basically nowhere. 

There’s only a moment of silence – punctuated by one of Ward’s obnoxious snores – before Daisy jumps back into conversation.

“We still haven’t talked about Fitz.”

Jemma’s stomach twists. She’d been trying rather hard not to think about him.

She sighs. “There’s nothing to speak of, he didn’t recognize me.”

“Simmons you told me you woke up in a _grave_. Something must have happened-“

“Nothing _happened_ , we just never met is all.” She flips another page of the newspaper. None of what Daisy wants to talk about is worth remembering. 

“But-“

“Fitz and I met at the Academy in 2003, the date on the gravestone was before that.”

Daisy frowns. “But then how did you die? If it wasn’t because of SHIELD?”

“I don’t know.” She has several ideas, though all of them send a chill through her veins. Before the Academy, before she met Fitz, things weren’t exactly going particularly well for her outside of getting her degrees. “But as far as we know this Fitz hasn’t ever even heard of SHIELD, much less attended the Academy.”

“Oh.” 

But Jemma can tell that Daisy’s already thinking of other things. Things that cause fifteen year olds to end up six feet under. She shakes the thought from her mind and turns another page of the newspaper, skimming the headlines.

Shit. 

_Three More Inhumans Dead in HYRDA Raid!_

~~

“Daisy.” Simmons’ voice has gone cold in an instant, not that she wasn’t serious a moment ago, but this is different, this is ‘bad things are happening presently’ voice not her ‘bad things happened previously’ voice. Daisy’s become a master in their recognition. 

“What?” She sets aside her donut, peering over Jemma’s shoulder to read the paper. 

The headline catches her eye in an instant and makes her sick to her stomach. It gets worse a second later when her eyes start automatically skimming down the article and she finds names. Familiar names. 

_Lori Henson_  
Shane Henson  
Lincoln Campbell 

For a second she’s torn between stumbling backwards, to retching her guts out in the grimy bathroom not three feet away, and tearing the page from Simmons’ hands, soaking up every piece of information on this possible. What she settles for is something in the middle, numbly staring at his name on the page. 

He was alive here. 

She let him die again. 

“Daisy.” Jemma is now in her quiet ‘I’m so sorry’ voice. She puts a hand on Daisy’s shoulder, shakes her slightly when she doesn’t respond. 

“Daisy look at the date.”

Somehow she manages to focus.

_March 12, 2017_

They were spat out on the 15th. It’s currently the 16th. 

She doesn’t know if it’s better or worse knowing there was still nothing she could have done. Knowing that she’s too late, again. 

“It’s not your fault.” Simmons’ whispers, her hand curling around Daisy’s shoulder, squeezing tightly. 

Daisy tries to not to cry. She tries to breathe, to pack back up the emotions that she’s been doing such a good job of suppressing, of denying, all these months. A half sob, sort of a hiccup, chokes her for a moment and her eyes fall shut. It shouldn’t still hurt this much. 

But they still haven’t found Mack, or Mace, and they need to convince the others to come home so she puts this aside as something to have a good long cry about when they get back and takes the paper from Simmons. Her fingers only shake slightly as she does so. 

The article makes her feel ten times worse. It’s hate rhetoric, _published_ hate rhetoric in a major paper, that goes on about the ‘plague to humanity’ that her people are. She’s surprised that it doesn’t also end with a ‘Hail Hydra’. 

“I don’t-“ she drops it to the floor, the single page floats down. “How could this happen?” Her fingers come up and she presses them to her temples. “How could the world get so colossally _fucked_ up? This place is supposed to be a mirror of our world, the same, but it’s-“

“Horror house shaped.” Jemma fills in when she cuts herself off. 

“Like something out of a nightmare.” Except even her mind isn’t messed up enough to give her this dream. 

“I don’t know.” Simmons says quietly after a moment. “They must have made changes, which must have spiralled things out of control.” She takes a deep breath. “But none of it matters, it’s not real.” Daisy thinks Jemma’s convincing herself as much as she’s trying to convince her.

“We just need to get them all back, then we can go home.”

Daisy nods. “Then we can go home.”

And never think of this place _ever_ again.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's been reading this! You're all so kind :)

By mid-afternoon there’s still no sign of May and Jemma gets into the car Fitz sent for her alone. 

After a quiet drive upstate, the house they pull up in front of is nothing short of a mansion. Really it probably ought to be called a castle. 

Three stories of red brick building loom in front of her as the driver pulls through a dark iron gate. The closed off front garden continues into a rolling estate. It doesn’t look like there’s a neighbour for miles.

 _No one to hear her scream._ The eerie thought swims unbidden into her mind. But there shouldn’t be any problems, as far as Ward knew, FitzTech had nothing to do with HYRDA.

She knocks and the front door is opened by Fitz himself, looking significantly more rumpled than the last time she saw him. This Fitz looks more like her own, the one she’s used to, and it sends a flood of relief through her that she didn’t know she needed.

“Morning,” he says, allowing her inside.

“It’s afternoon.”

He lifts his wrist to look at a watch that’s no longer there, then shakes his head. “It’s still morning.”

Jemma presses a smile down. 

“Come on in, we’ll get right down to the lab and I’ll show you what I’ve been working on.” He leads them back into the house, then into a shiny elevator hidden by oak doors. 

“This is a lovely home you have.” Though it’s nothing like what she would expect Fitz to like, he usually prefers smaller, homier spaces. Even after they left the Academy, once their income allowed them a larger living space, Fitz still insisted that they keep the squished-in feel of their dorm rooms. He’d loved the little nest that could be made of his bunk on the Bus.

The lift shifts lower, dropping her stomach out slightly.

The Fitz in front of her shrugs. “It’s alright. Dad picked it out, something about an estate sale, he doesn’t like the city so he stays out here. Honestly I don’t spend a lot of time here.”

The ease with which he says ‘Dad’ feels like a wound, like a knife carving into her heart. But she can’t let him know that there’s any emotion to show.

“To be honest I figured we’d be meeting at your company, Fitz.” She hadn’t even known he had a house out here, figured that the building that contained his company would be enough. 

“Well, you asked for discretion. There’s no one here to see the work but us.”

“Yes, I suppose I did.” He doesn’t seem to be listening to her. She studies the look on his face but can’t get a grip on what the expression means.

The elevator door opens and Fitz grins, the teeth on the right side of his mouth showing more than those on the left. “You know, I looked you up.”

Her heart plummets into her stomach. The lie on her lips spins away. “Oh really?”

“Yeah.” He opens the door for her, let’s them into a long hallway. “I didn’t find anything.” He opens another door, revealing yet another hallway. She doesn’t know how she’s going to find her way out of this maze.

“There’s absolutely no record of Jemma Simmons, Biochemist, anywhere, as far as I can tell. Not even an old, embarrassing Facebook page.”

She tries to smile. “I’ve never much been one for exhibitionism.” And thankfully her family wouldn’t have put her obituary online, not in 2002 at least. In the local paper maybe, depends on the circumstance, but never online. 

The unrecognizable emotion is still in his eyes. It shifts unease over her, unsettling her heart from its place in her chest. 

“And your employment history?”

Trying to act casual – and probably failing miserably at hiding her racing heart – she shrugs. “My employers have always valued discretion.”

Finally, they reach the end of the hallway, to a door broader than the others with a fairly intense lock on it. Fitz presses his finger into the lock pad then taps out a six digit password. He holds the door for her to step through in front of him. 

“That still doesn’t answer my question as to who you are.”

The compression seal on the door hisses shut behind her, locked. His face drops into a stony expression. Jemma thinks for a moment that she may have underestimated this version of him, with his coy smiles and air of arrogance. She might’ve underestimated just how much he is capable of. 

~~

Daisy really wants to kill him. 

Ward had woken up an hour ago, apparently recovered from his minor brain trauma and ready to grill her for every detail he can manage about what’s going on.

The problem is that Daisy would much rather be digging through the newspapers that Simmons left for more information on the inhumans situation. And Ward’s constant interrupting isn’t remotely helpful. But she can’t let him out of her sight because he might alert HYRDA to what’s going on. Altogether, it’s an unideal situation. 

“You’re not going to find anything new the third time you read it, Skye.” He speaks like he knows he has the answer and she forgot how infuriating that is. It’s also infuriating that he seems to be making no attempt to call her Daisy, even though she asked him nicely to. 

She rolls her eyes, not giving him any response. In her mind, it’s simple, she doesn’t want to talk to him.

He hasn’t gotten that idea yet. 

“I bet I could tell you some of the information you’re looking for.”

Daisy closes the paper; it mimics her huff of annoyance. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” He sits up, probably surprised by her even responding. But he’s not wrong, she’s just reading the same information over again, it’s not actually going to help. 

If May could hurry up and come kill her already it would be a blessing. 

“Like what?”

He pauses. “What kind of intel are you after?”

He’s fucking flirting with her. God. She wants to take a shower. But the best response is probably to mimic him, which fucking sucks. 

“I wanna know what Hydra is doing with the inhumans.”

He startles. “Inhumans? They’re a plague, a disease attacking the species. HYRDA’s trying to make sure that more people don’t get infected.”

Under her skin, her blood boils. Anger mixed with hurt makes a hard emotion to control and honestly she feels a bit sick.

“Yes. That’s what the news reports say.” She folds her hands. “What I want is what they’re doing with the ones they _don’t_ kill. Where are the captured ones kept?”

“HYRDA doesn’t take prisoners.”

“You and I both know that’s bullshit propaganda. Unless your higher ups are much dumber than I originally thought, it doesn’t make sense to kill them all, you need them to keep finding more.”

When he bites his back teeth together, she knows she’s got him. 

“Well?”

“There’s a facility.”

That sounds enormously bad. 

~~

“I don’t work for Hydra. I thought you people would have learned that by now.”

Simmons glances at the door - it’s got a similar lock pad situation on this side as well and there’s no way she’s getting through it without his hand, even if she could probably guess the code - then back to him. He’s tapping out something on a computer terminal, his forehead pinched in annoyance from his raving. 

“I don’t work for Hydra.” 

He scoffs, keeps typing. “That’s not particularly convincing.”

“Fitz.” 

He glances up for a second, meets her eyes. She hopes he finds depth there. 

_“I don’t work for Hydra.”_

He turns away from the table. “Then who do you work for? Because I don’t go along with this ‘private think tank’ business, not anymore, not with Hydra slithering their way through every science and technology division in the country.”

“Fitz.” She needs to calm him down, she wants to touch him but she doesn’t know how this version of him would react. It’s hard to remember that from his perspective, she’s a complete stranger. 

She catches his hand anyways, as he paces next to her. His hand is smooth, warm; the edge of his nail drags across the soft pad of her hand, scoring a line without breaking the skin. It drags him to a halt. “Fitz, I need you to listen to me.”

~~

“What kind of facility?” Daisy’s heart hammers in her throat, she doesn’t think she wants to know the answer. 

“I don’t know.”

She glares. He holds his hands up in surrender. 

“Honestly, I’ve never been. But I’ve heard it referred to before, when we capture a high value target. They’re transferred to the Tank.”

The sweat on her skin goes cold, goosebumps flash over her arms. Experimentation then. If only history would stop repeating itself. 

She needs to know more. She needs to know every possible detail but the thought of what it could be makes her sick to her stomach. This can’t be happening. A logical part of her mind tries to assert that it _isn’t_ actually happening but she can’t grip onto that thought thread. 

Grief bubbles up, for Lincoln, for her friends from Afterlife, for the horrors that her people are facing, in this world because of them, because of her. 

A key card slips into the lock, the door beeps, unlocking. Daisy’s gaze glances by Ward on her way to the stare at the door. 

The Cavalry is here.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting this from the corner of the lounge of my hostel, hoping that no one is reading over my shoulder. Thanks so much for all the love this fic is getting!

Daisy rolls out of the way as the door crashes open and a gun sweeps through the room. Drywall crumbles under where her shoulders press into the worn paint. Ward is at her side a moment later. 

“We’re unarmed.” Daisy calls and May’s weapon turns the corner to point straight at them, well at Ward. 

“We just want to talk to you.” She holds her hands up. Ward doesn’t. “Nobody needs to get hurt.”

She figures now is as good a time as any to test out Simmons’ visualization theory. Picturing them all standing around the room – with the guns away – talking like it’ll somehow make it true is easy, what she’s not sure about is how they get there. 

“I take it the two of you _aren’t_ here for a last minute vacation that you forgot to mention to _anyone_.” May speaks to Ward, not Daisy, and there’s a surprising lilt to her voice, like she finds this entertaining. 

“Yeah,” Daisy says, drawing the other woman’s attention. “That’s not really what’s going on. So why don’t you just put the gun down and we’ll talk about it?”

Three things happen at once. May rolls her eyes, her ridged body position slackening ever so slightly. A siren echoes through the thin glass of the window. And Ward makes a grab for the gun. 

A bullet goes through the wall between them then the weapon clatters to the floor. Daisy takes an instinctive step back while Ward gets punched in the face again. It’s not displeasing to watch. 

She lets him take one more good hit before intervening. Imagining what she’s about to do in her mind before she actually does it, Daisy kicks Ward in the gut, sending him backwards a few steps, then manages to get both her hands on May’s shoulders and shove closer to the other side of the room. Somehow, it works and both look stunned enough by her intervention that they pause in their attacks. 

“We don’t need to fight.” She keeps her hands held out still, holds her gaze on May and lets Ward puff breath back into his lungs. 

“Then why doesn’t one of you tell me what the hell is going on.” May’s looking at her oddly, like she’s trying to figure something out, but it seems like she’s willing to listen. 

Now all Daisy has to do is sell her remarkable tale. 

“You’re not gonna want to believe this.” Daisy says, taking a step forward. “But…”

~~

“You expect me to believe that this is all just some figment of my imagination? That none of this is actually real?”

Simmons figures that his ranting is better than him straightly denying her and kicking her out of his house. Although his voice bounces off the walls in a weird sort of echo in the massive room, making her wince. 

“Not of your imagination no, of someone else’s making. Do you know of a Doctor Holden Radcliffe?”

That makes him pause. “He’s a transhumanist, right? We’ve crossed paths a couple of times at conventions.”

“Yes, that’s right.” She takes a step towards him and this time he doesn’t instinctually flinch backwards. 

“He’s created what he calls ‘The Framework’, it’s an augmented reality experience that looks and feels and _tastes_ as real as real life and that’s where we are right now.”

“That’s not possible.” He starts pacing again. “The technology that it would need is ages off, hell we’re just getting a grip on AI.”

“You were going to help me do it, Fitz. That’s what I was asking you to build on the jet yesterday, you know it’s not that far outside the realm of possibility.”

“Well, yeah but I didn’t think you were anywhere near implementation! Besides, what we were talking about was just specific scenarios, not an entire world. That’s impossible.”

“It should be. But Radcliffe found a book with immeasurable knowledge and power, that gives the reader the code to whatever they wish the most.”

“A magic book?” he scoffs, “that’s what you’re going with?”

“Fitz.” She touches his elbow, pleads with him with her eyes then watches a sigh fall through his body.

“Start at the beginning.”

And she does.

~~

May crosses her arms over her chest as Daisy sags back against the wall. It’s not an encouraging expression, the one she’s getting right now. 

“I don’t believe you.”

It’s not a complete surprise. What she’s selling is rather beyond what a reasonable person would accept as factual. Even though she went into more details than she did with Ward, it only makes it less believable, not more. It’s even harder to sell because she doesn’t even understand the science of it all. 

“Come on May, hasn’t anything ever felt hollow? Like some part of you is missing? Think about it.” Daisy isn’t above begging at this point. She just hopes that the feeling of emptiness under her own skin is universal and not just the absence of her powers. 

May glares harder. 

“You know that I’m right. It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? Things that just don’t quite add up, questions that go unanswered because you forgot that you asked them.” Daisy takes a careful step forward. “This isn’t the real world, this isn’t your real life, help me get us all back to that.”

The frown stays and Daisy waits her out. Ward sighs behind her, the entire ice bucket pressed to the new mark blooming on his face. 

“So what if you’re right? What am I going to do about it?”

Daisy smiles. “You’re going to help me convince the others, then you’re all going to wake yourselves up.”

~~

“You can’t actually expect me to believe this.”

Simmons’ sighs, her hands raking down her cheeks on their way to gesticulate in the air. “It’s the truth.” 

He paces again. She leans on the edge of one of the worktops, her arms crossed over her chest. They’ve been going back and forth with no real progression for too long now. She’s not sure what else there is to say, how else she could convince him. 

She watches the loop of the lab that he does, then he walks the line back and forth in front of her. 

“So you’re my…”

“Girlfriend, yeah.” She looks at her feet on the floor, her black trainers against the concrete. “But,” she sighs, “more than that, I suppose.” To sum up the more than decade now of their relationship in a single word would be impossible. 

He grins, the one she’s come to hate. “So what? No Snow White kiss for me? Our eternal love isn’t gonna save the day?”

Jemma scoffs, pushes herself forward to rock off the counter then shifts back to it. “Please, this isn’t a fairy tale.”

“Well then what the _bloody_ hell _is_ it because I’m lost, Simmons.” 

Her entire being feels as if it deflates. “You don’t believe me.” It’s not a question. 

He drags his hand over his face, his bottom lip caught in his teeth, a look of pure distress on his face. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to.”

“Come on Fitz, you know that there’s science out there that we can’t even begin to understand yet.”

“Science, yes! But this is, this is something else. What you’re talking about, it shouldn’t be possible.”

“Neither should a glider that can cross the Atlantic! Fitz, you make impossible things happen every day, _we_ do. I just need you to believe in me, just for a couple of days, and if at the end of that, nothing’s happened, you can go back to this life and forget all about me.” Letting her hands drop, she takes a step forward. “I promise I’ll never bother you again, just give me a week.”

He stares at her, for longer than a minute, and she wills it to work out, for her to find some glimmer of recognition in his features, and for them to fix this together, like they always do.

She doesn’t quite get her wish. Instead, both his hands curl around the back of his neck for a moment and he stares at the ceiling. Then, he nods solemnly.

“I guess we better get to work.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been a bit guys but I've had a hell of a week. Chapters should get a bit more regular from here on out. I'm still hoping to get this thing finished before the next episode!

“How is this even possible?” Daisy whispers into the dimmed room. The overhead lights are off but lamps in the corners illuminate the machines, and the body. 

“I don’t know.” Jemma says back, but she’s already reaching forward from where Daisy is frozen by the door. Fitz follows, hovering at her shoulder as he has since the two of them showed up at the motel. 

May and Ward exchange a look at the back of the room but Daisy pays them no attention. 

The heartrate monitor beeps steadily, the rush of air moves through the respirator and Daisy feels her own breath rattle out of her lungs. Mace lies as still as death, his face clean of bruising, of scarring, but ashen white. The machine cycles again. 

They saw the headline of the article – _American Hero Comatose After Saving Lives in Vienna Attack_ – but it had been old, and Daisy figured it was a cover, that he’d been recruited by Hydra too. But Simmons had insisted that they check it out anyways. 

And here he is. 

It feels wrong. 

“Does this mean he’s dead?” They never actually saw the Director being rescued. 

Simmons shakes her head, she’s already flipping through the file stuck in the end of the bed. “Not necessarily, there’s a chance he’s still alive with the others. If he’d been too injured when Aida got to him…” Simmons trails off, reading, then she shuts the file firmly. “Swelling in the brain could cause this.”

“So what? He’s in a coma in the real world too?”

“That’s a very likely possibility.”

A nurse pushes into the room and visibly startles. 

“Oh, hello.” She’s got a hand to her chest in shock. Jemma smiles at her, Daisy stares. 

“I wasn’t expecting anyone to be visiting this one.”

“He doesn’t have any visitors?”

The nurse shakes her head. “There’s no family, as far as I’ve heard.”

Well that makes her feel even worse somehow. They both watch in silence as the nurse checks the machines then heads back towards the door. 

It’s only once she’s through it that Daisy realizes she’s left. She has to jog slightly to catch up, Simmons dragging behind her, the others lingering further. 

“I’m sorry but, do you think he’ll ever wake up?”

Simmons shoots her a look that’s almost a glare. 

The nurse looks apologetic. “It’s been years.” She steps forward and touches Daisy’s arm. “I’m very sorry.”

She pulls back. “Yeah, thanks.”

The nurse nods again and leaves them both standing in the empty hallway.

Jemma’s hand replaces the nurses’. “Daisy.”

“It’s my fault. He was captured because of me, to save me.” Because the Watchdogs wanted an inhuman, and they supplied Mace. 

Simmons shakes her head. “He made a choice.”

As if that absolves her of her guilt. 

“So what now?” Ward has caught up with them. He stands too close to Daisy’s elbow.

Simmons’ glares at him, Daisy shrugs it off. They have to keep moving forward. 

“Mack. We find Mack next.”

May turns to Ward. “Who’s Mack?”

“Alphonso Mackenzie. Does he work for Hydra?”

“I’ve never heard the name before.”

“Me either.” May pulls out her phone. “But I can search the database, find some information on him regardless.”

“Wait a second.” Fitz brings out his own device, scrolls only for a minute before looking back up at the group. “I know that name, he’s one of my engineers.” He shows the phone forward. “Is that him?”

Mack’s smiling face is displayed on the screen, under it is his name and a series of qualifications in a sort of profile. 

“Yeah,” Daisy says, “do you have his address?”

Fitz rolls his eyes. “Of course I have his address, it’s right there.”

~~

Fitz takes her to California on yet another fancy jet. Apparently Mack works for FitzTech in development at their headquarters in Oakland. Despite the comforts of the plane, it’s another agonizing flight. For all the good her ‘wishful thinking’ is doing for other parts of their plan, it doesn’t do anything for cutting down on travel time. 

Fitz has been trying for the last hour to ply her with champagne to ease her worries. It hasn’t worked yet. She doesn’t even think that she could get drunk here, not unless she wanted to. 

Eventually, she plucks the flute from his hand just to stop his insisting.

He grins. “There, that wasn’t so hard was it?”

Simmons rolls her eyes. The ego on him is getting old. 

She sighs. “You’re sure you don’t remember _anything_ about our real lives? Not even anything you thought was made up or a dream?” 

She had been hoping that the memories would come back easily once someone started pushing for them. Human minds can’t every really forget things, just misplace them, so Radcliffe could only have plastered over what was already there. But she doesn’t seem to be cracking in any.

“Nothing.” Fitz settles down on the sofa next to her, his knees dropping open so that one of them bumps into hers. “Sorry.”

The urge to sigh presses up again and she just barely restrains herself. “That’s all right, just let me know if you do.”

“Yes, Boss.” He salutes. She rolls her eyes. The engines rumble. 

“So, what’s the grand plan for getting out of here? Once we’ve collected all your friends?”

Simmons purses her lips. “There’s a backdoor programmed that will allow Daisy and I out for certain, I’m hoping that the rest of you will be able to follow.”

“Then we wake up in some unknown enemy base, probably suffering from some kind of withdrawal, and hope that we’re not immediately shot dead.”

“Yup.” It’s an impossible plan, she’s known that from the start, but as Daisy said, they have to try.

“And we radio you and Daisy in from god knows where to come and save us all.”

“That’s the plan.”

He pauses, considering the odds probably. It’s doubtful he finds them in their favour. 

“And if we can’t get out?”

She’d thought of that, really it’s been one of the many constant pressing fears in the back of her mind since she realized he was gone, but she still hasn’t been able to come up with a solution. 

A frightfully forced smile makes its way across her lips. “Well I guess that’s something you better start working on.”

He is the one who built this thing after all – parts of it at least – even if he doesn’t remember doing it.

~~

“I can’t believe I let the two of you talk me into this.” May scowls out the passenger seat window while Daisy drives and Ward in the back seat hangs forward over their chairs. 

“I know it seems like a long shot, really I do, but trust me, this _is_ happening, and you’re the only one who can get to Coulson.”

“And why is that?”

“He,” Daisy hesitates. This Coulson has never met May, has no affiliation with Hydra whatsoever, she’s got no tangible reason for believing that May will be able to achieve what she feels she can’t, getting some degree of familiarity out of him. Except Simmons got Fitz to trust her. 

“He trusts you. In the real world,” she explains, “he trusts you more than anyone else.”

The lines in May’s forehead deepen, her scowl harshens.

“And you think that’s going to magically make him trust what he sees as a total stranger?”

Daisy pauses, thinks, and almost misses the exit from the highway because she swore last time there was an apartment complex there. 

“Maybe,” she bites her lip, turns the car, and uses driving as an excuse not to look at May. “Maybe not, but it’s the best chance I have.”

Ward scoffs in the backseat, his head leaned forward and too near Daisy’s ear. 

“We don’t even have anything on this guy, he’s just a schoolteacher. Completely-“

“Shut up, Ward.” May cracks and Daisy grips the steering wheel tighter, suppressing a smile. Ward huffs and falls back into his seat properly again.

“This guy means a lot to you, Skye?” Her eyes soften with her voice and Daisy suddenly wonders what their relationship is like here, if this May took Skye under her wing just as much as Daisy’s own did. 

Daisy nods, meets May’s eyes with as much sincerity as she can muster. “To you too.”

~~

Mr. Coulson had a daily routine, every action of his day was planned down to the minute in an order that followed day to day, to week to week, to month to month. And he liked it that way, thank you very much. 

He woke in the morning at precisely 6:15, took a shower while the coffee brewed, then drank his one mug and ate a bowl of bran flakes while reading over student essays. Then, after clearing away his dishes, he got in his car and drove into school at precisely 7:10 in order to have time to unlock his classroom and finish up some last minute grading before the first bell rang at 8:50.

So he does not appreciate it when on a Wednesday morning at 6:23, just as he’s pouring milk into his cereal, there’s an urgent knock at the door.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One week! Sorry this is a bit of a shorter one but I wanted to get something up tonight and it was kinda necessary to break it off here. Anyways, hope you enjoy!

Daisy knocks on the apartment door while the other two hesitate in front of it. She rolls her eyes to herself and taps four times against the hardwood. 

Twenty seconds later the door pulls open revealing a fully suited up Coulson. It only takes another ten seconds for his expression to shift from annoyed, but politely smiling to something darker. 

“Look, I’m glad I made an impression on you Miss, but showing up at my home is unacceptable-“

“Mr. Coulson, I’m afraid I wasn’t completely honest with you earlier.”

“Not again,” he mutters, anger now clouding over his features. 

He tries to shut the door. 

~~

There’s a bicycle on the lawn as they step out of the car. It’s purple, large but still obviously belonging to a child. Dread settles over Jemma as they walk up to the front door. The sunshine contrasts it, spilling a cheery vibe over the suburban landscape. 

When the doorbell chimes it sets off the deep barking of a dog that they can’t see through the curtained front windows. Fitz takes a somewhat hesitant step back when the door opens. 

A young girl, no older than twelve stands before them, the head of a slobbering Doberman stuffed, caught between her knee and the doorframe. 

“Hi,” she smiles and it’s Mack’s smile repeated onto a different face. 

Fitz recovers faster. “Hi, are your parents’ home?”

Just as the girl opens her mouth to speak again Mack’s booming voice emerges from deeper in the house.

“Hope! What have I said about answering the door!”

Mack’s broad frame dwarfs the girls as he emerges behind her, pulling the dog back into the house, he smiles politely. 

“Can I help you?”

“Mr. Mackenzie.” Fitz holds out his hand, stepping closer to the house.

“Mr. Fitz,” He sounds more than a little surprised and takes a hand off his daughters shoulder to shake Fitz’s. “Did I do some- Is something wrong?”

Fitz smiles wryly. “That’s a bit more complicated of a question than you think it is at the moment, Mr. Mackenzie.” He pulls Simmons forward by the elbow. “This is my colleague, Dr. Jemma Simmons, she’s got something she’d like to speak with you about.”

~~

*Ten Minutes Earlier*

Coulson sets down his mug of coffee with a resigned sigh and goes to answer the door. Waiting for him, is a man. Tall and thin with dark skin and classically handsome features laid out in an inviting smile. 

“Good morning, Mr. Coulson. May we come in?”

An even taller blonde woman hovers behind him, her gaze darting around the hallway beyond his apartment. 

“That depends, who are you?”

“Mr. Coulson, we’re with an organization that’s here to help, we-“

“We’re with SHIELD,” the blonde cuts in, her expression more than serious. “And you’re in danger.”

~~

“Hope, go get ready for school.” His voice turns stern in an instant, not even six words into Jemma’s speech about reality. 

“I _am_ ready, Daddy,” she whines, pressing forward out of his grip towards Jemma, towards the story.

“Hope.” His tone leaves no room for arguments and she slinks away back into the house, pouting.

Mack steps out of the doorway, closing it behind him. It pushes them all out further onto the sidewalk. 

“Look, I don’t know what you’re doing at my house, but you need to leave.”

“Mr. Mackenzie,” Fitz steps forward again.

“Mack.” Jemma interrupts him. “I just need you to hear me out.”

He scowls. And she’s failed. 

~~

Daisy shoves her foot in the doorframe at just the last second before it latches shut. Funnily enough, she doesn’t feel the ache of the impact through her boot, even though she thinks for a moment that she should. 

“Mr. Coulson.” She pushes the door back open and steps past him into the apartment. It looks like it’s been staged as a show home but she brushes off the impersonality of the space and turns back to Coulson, who looks affronted that she’s dared to barge in. 

“I’m going to call the police if you don’t get out of here.”

“Mr. Coulson...” Ward tries, but Daisy shoots him a glare to shut him up. 

“That wouldn’t do you any good.”

He seems to be ignoring her, has moved from standing shocked by the door to puttering around his kitchen, muttering to himself. 

“Second time in one morning… just absolutely unacceptable…”

“Coulson,” Daisy puts a hand on his shoulder to stop him. He flinches. 

“Are we not the first ones here?”

“No!” he explodes, throwing his hands in the air, almost catching Daisy if she hadn’t moved back already. 

“I just got the other agents out of here when you all showed up!”

Daisy turns on May and Ward. 

“What did you do?”

They exchange a glance. Daisy itches to reach for her weapon but knows it would just freak Coulson out more. 

“Who did you call?”

“No one!” Ward protests. 

May holds out her hands. “Nothing, Skye, we didn’t do anything.”

“Then who?” she glances at Coulson, who has the expression of a lost puppy and stands numbly beside his island countertop, then back at May. “Who showed up here?”

“They said they were with SHIELD.” 

~~

An earthquake rumbles beneath the streets of Los Angeles. The roads quiver, jostling but not buckling the pavement. In a diner, the coffee in a man’s mug sloshes, just barely contained by the porcelain, not daring to run over the edges of the mug. 

A child sits in her front garden and watches. Watches the bee which was sitting happily upon a daisy flutter up, take flight, and buzz suddenly skyward. The grass flutters around her, as if in an invisible breeze, but she doesn’t feel the shaking. 

A remote auxiliary storage facility for FitzTech crumbles. The empty building shakes on its foundation, beams and joists breaking down, falling in on themselves, splintering wood and drywall and metal into dust which does not rise up into the atmosphere. 

The roof caves, the walls fall in. An entire building folds down as easily as a paper cube, one made by schoolchildren, held together by stick glue and careful creases. The materials disintegrate, folding in and in and in until there is not even a mote of dust left behind. Desert takes over the space once again, nothing remaining but a dry and empty landscape. 

There is no one around to notice. 

Leo Fitz awakes from a nightmare.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for all the love you guys are leaving on this story! Sorry I haven't been responding to comments, I just moved and I don't have internet for another week (pray for me, I don't know how I'm gonna watch the new ep eek!) but I really do appreciate it :)

“SHIELD?” 

“Don’t be ridiculous SHIELD doesn’t exist anymore.” Ward rolls his eyes. Daisy shushes him.

Coulson holds up his hands. “That’s what they said. The man at least, the woman was trying to convince me that I was in danger,” he scoffs. 

“Who were they?” Daisy steps forward and Coulson shrinks back. 

“I didn’t get their names, I was trying to get them out of my apartment.”

“Well what did they look like?” she’s getting too eager, she knows it, but if there’s some chance that they’ve got help here, help that they didn’t even know about, that’s going to be a huge advantage. To have SHIELD’s resources would make getting home a piece of cake. 

May puts a hand on Daisy’s shoulder, reining her back from an increasingly worried Coulson. “Maybe we should focus on what we came here to do?”

“Right,” Daisy says to herself. She needs to focus on the task at hand. She turns to Coulson, starts in on the sales pitch. “You need to come with us.”

 

~~

“You fell asleep.” Jemma says quietly as Fitz sits up, startled. She watches as he rubs his eyes and looks around. They’re in a car, on their way back to one of Fitz’s many homes from the failed attempt to convince Mack. 

“But you didn’t.” Fitz says. His voice sounds off. She doesn’t know if she should pry into why or not. 

“Can’t.” Jemma has been looking at the schematics he designed earlier and the changes that he’s already implemented, focusing on getting them home. It’s fascinating to her that this mind works almost identically to the one she’s familiar with even though the personality is entirely different. 

Fitz scrubs his hands over his face and Simmons watches him. She folds her hands together carefully before she asks. 

“Are you alright?”

Fitz’s brow furrows. “Yeah, I’m fine.” He shakes his head. “Just had a dream is all.”

That piques her interest. “What about?”

Shaking his head again he reaches out for the tablet she was reading from. “I don’t really know.”

“Well what can you remember?” 

“I don’t know, alright,” he’s just shy of snapping at her and while normally she would know the right words to placate him, be able to put her hand on his shoulder to calm him down, here her instincts are all wrong, she can’t trust them. 

“I’m sorry,” she says it quietly for lack of anything else. “It’s just if you’re remembering, then it could be of use to us.”

He sighs, hard, as evidence of how frustrated he’s trying not to be, and pulls at the back of his neck with one hand. 

“There was, like a reverse fish tank, I was in the tank and there was sea life all around me, and,” he pauses, takes a breath. She watches him think. “A man in a suit, who I didn’t recognize.”

He laughs a little, to himself. “Something to do with artificial transmutation of elements.”

Simmons smiles, sadness curling up the edges of her lips. He’d almost blown them both away in her dorm room, he was so convinced that the project couldn’t work. 

“Yes, that was one of the first projects we worked on together at the Academy.” 

It was a long time ago now. 

“Nothing any more specific though.” He looks at her with an apology, with eyes the size of the universe, endless, edgeless, a galaxy that’s hers for the taking. 

Jemma leans back against the car window, feels the warmth of the sun through the tinted glass against her bare shoulder. It’s not as warm as he is. She glances out the window. 

Palm trees float past them along the highway. Typical California traffic piles up on the roads. The sun is still high in the sky, seemingly unmoving. 

~~

Coulson starts to laugh. In the full out, slightly manic, I don’t believe you in the slightest sort of way.

Ward shoots Daisy a look, like he’s asking whether or not he can knock this guy out. Daisy glares back in response. 

“Look I know this seems crazy-“

“Because it is crazy.” Coulson cuts her off, still bent over with laughter, one hand steadying himself on the counter. “Really, it’s a great joke, har har, you got me, but it’s time for you to leave now.”

“I’m not joking Coulson.” 

Except he’s not laughing anymore. Really, he’s glaring at her. It’s not altogether very encouraging. 

“Phil.”

May steps forward, pushes Daisy back towards Ward and takes Coulson’s elbow, leads him further into the kitchen where Daisy can’t hear what they’re saying. Ward hovers at her shoulder still, his puppy dog eyes caught on her face. She quirks her eyebrows.

“Yes?”

He shrugs. “Nothing.”

She rolls her eyes. 

The sound of someone getting punched draws her attention back to May and Coulson. 

May is holding up Coulson’s slumping, unconscious body.

“A little help?”

~~

Simmons’ answers her phone, interrupting her conversation with Fitz. 

“Daisy,” she answers without looking at the screen, there’s only one person who knows this number.

“Yeah, how’s it going with Mack?”

Simmons sighs, “Not well, I think we might need someone a little less intimidating than _Mr. Fitz_ here.”

“Oi!” Fitz protests but she ignores him. 

“Do you have Coulson?”

Even through the phone Jemma can tell that Daisy’s making a face. “You could say that.”

She doesn’t need to know what that means. If Daisy’s handling it, it’ll be handled. 

“Why don’t you come out here and try your luck with Mack. A stranger might do better.” Although honestly she’s not sure anything will convince him, not with Hope to contend with. A parent’s love for their child is the strongest bond there is. Simmons’ doesn’t want to have to exploit that. 

“Yeah, maybe. We should reconvene anyways.”

“Tell her I’ll send a jet.” Fitz doesn’t look up from his phone to speak to her. Jemma rolls her eyes. 

“Did you get that?”

“Yup,” Daisy answers, “Tell him I expect his fanciest tech, no selling me short, then text me the details.”

Jemma laughs, “will do. See you soon, Daisy.”

“See you soon.”

They both hang up. 

Fitz rubs his forehead again, an action that’s been becoming more and more frequent over the last few hours, or what she thinks has been the last few hours, it’s hard to tell. 

“Are you remembering things?”

He shakes his head. “Maybe, I’m not sure.”

He doesn’t continue and she doesn’t press any further. They’ve done enough of that uncomfortable back and forth explaining, her too eager, him not understanding enough. If things come to him, they come to him, and if they don’t, they don’t. At least, that’s what she’s been trying to convince herself. 

“Simmons,” he says with not enough familiarity, without the usual ease of her name on his lips. “You said you woke up in a grave here.”

“Yes.” She bites down on the inside of her cheek and hopes that she doesn’t have to explain it any further. That’s not the kind of conversation she’d hoped to have twice with him.

“So in the Framework, you’re dead.”

“Yes.” Where he’s going is familiar because it’s the first place she went upon awakening. It’s what she said to Daisy just before they passed out. If you die in the Framework, you die in real life. 

“Are you going to be able to wake up?” he asks the question that she’s been avoiding asking herself. 

Simmons pushes away the thrum of anxiety under her skin, it’s not useful now, and focuses on Fitz’s worried eyes. Does he know her? Or has she just endeared herself to him over the last few days? She can’t tell.

“I don’t know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second to last one! Final chapter should be up on Monday sometime, cross your fingers for me that I get reliable enough internet to do it!


	16. Chapter 16

It doesn’t take five hours of flight time to get to California. In fact, almost as soon as they’ve gotten on the plane they’re getting off onto a sunshine soaked stretch of tarmac. A car takes them into the city to meet up with FitzSimmons in a similarly warped fashion. 

Then, without total knowledge of how she got there, Daisy is walking down a street lined with palm trees talking to Simmons about Mack. 

“Did you know?” Simmons asks, after explaining the situation.

“No, of course I didn’t know.” Daisy says. She pushes a piece of hair back out of her eyes and stumbles into a stranger on the street, missing FitzSimmons’ response. 

“Sorry,” she mumbles, stepping out of the way and jogging a few steps to return to the group. 

Fitz has launched into some kind of scientific explaining that she doesn’t understand so instead of listening Daisy watches Coulson – who _has_ been dragged along unwillingly – and tries not to wonder what this new piece of information about her partner’s life means. It could all just be made up, though she sort of doubts that. 

“I’ve been kidnapped.” Coulson tells a stranger, trying to peel off from the group, Ward corrals him back in. “I’m being kidnapped.” He says slightly louder with an increase in panic. It draws the attention of a young woman, who peers at the group.

Daisy smiles at her. “Sorry, bad trip.” She tugs on Coulson’s arm and the woman makes a face, but moves along. 

Daisy turns to May. “I wish you hadn’t done that.” 

May shrugs. “He wasn’t going to come willingly. You said we needed him.”

Admittedly, it was faster than convincing him, and this Coulson doesn’t seem to possess much physical prowess which doesn’t make him particularly difficult to contain. 

Simmons tries to fold her back into the conversation she’s having with Fitz. More technical talk about what they’re going to do after they’ve gotten Mack. The tentative plan is still to fly back to the east coast and get into the rendezvous point. But Fitz is trying to come up with something in case they need a backup plan, which honestly, when do they not need a backup plan. Not that Daisy really understands anything they’re saying, it doesn’t help that they’re doing the half sentence thing, where neither finishes a complete thought on their own. 

A tremble runs through the earth. It rattles the windows of the storefront and sways the leaves on the trees. A low earthquake, nothing to worry about, they are in California after all. 

“Well it wasn’t me.” Daisy scoffs. She fights the useless urge to control the shaking, to rumble the earth back in protest or seek out the coming aftershocks. 

The street is empty. 

“That’s not right.” Fitz turns in a circle before his gaze falls onto Simmons. “Right?”

“No…” Simmons looks around too.

“What’s going on guys?”

“The fault lines- to have a-“

The earth rumbles again, Daisy loses track of what Simmons was saying. It’s a larger one this time. The row of palm trees sway dangerously. 

It feels different. The first one did as well but she thought that it was just her, just feeling it normally instead of with her powers. But this one’s definitely different. The shake doesn’t come from the earth below them, it comes from everywhere. Like the breeze in the air is rattling rather than blowing across them. As if the buildings themselves are vibrating against a current.

“The rendezvous!” Simmons calls as the world tumbles. Daisy finds that she can’t quite hear the words, or rather she hears them inside of her own mind instead of outside it. Like Simmons’ voice is just one of her own thoughts, slightly louder than the rest. 

Her own body loses its physicality. The sense of her limbs within the space leaves her, she becomes a cloud, floating within an non-existent space as a non-existent being. The ground under her feet is no longer under her feet but she doesn’t fall, she’s caught without gravity like in a cartoon, where the character runs off a cliff but waits a moment to tumble downwards. Then, her moment’s up.

~~

Simmons blinks and the ground has fallen out from under her. The setting shifts, changes, without even dropping her stomach like a roller coaster ride. Trembles run through the earth, the trees, the buildings, but they don’t touch her any longer. She stands as a ghost in the scene. 

The world set before her is obviously no longer California. Oaks replace palm trees, clouds cover over the pressing sunshine, and the taste of the air shifts to dampness. 

“What the hell is going on?” Daisy says. 

Simmons looks around and finds the whole group there as well, transported just as suddenly as she was. 

“You’re probably messing with the timeline of the thing.” Fitz is looking at his hands like they’re not real hands. Jemma feels the unshakable urge to do the same. 

“What?” Daisy is definitely the most freaked out by this change in circumstances. Simmons figures she isn’t so fond of the uncontrollable earthquakes. 

“Think about it,” Fitz continues, “if this framework is built off of our minds, is structured to give us everything we want, then the rest of it is just filler, all the other people are just avatars, existing to fill the illusion for those whose minds are inhabitants. So when the two of you came in and started making decisions as avatars, not as inhabitants - whose minds are woven into the Framework - it-“ he throws his hands. “Well it messed everything up. And now we’re seeing the damage you’ve caused.” 

“And why didn’t anyone bring this up before?” Daisy’s voice escalates through the question until it’s ringing an octave higher than her normal tone. 

“I was hoping that wouldn’t be the case, that the Framework would be able to self-correct for any changes we made.” Simmons puts her hand on Daisy’s shoulder and finds she can feel neither the other girls t-shirt or the skin of her own palm. “Evidently not.”

“Well what now?” Ward asks, still there, following Daisy, for what reason Jemma isn’t particularly sure. 

“The rendezvous. There’s no time to get to Mack now, we just have to get out.”

And as soon as she says the words, there they are. 

~~

Daisy hasn’t been back to FitzSimmons’ apartment since she lured Simmons there. She doesn’t even know if FitzSimmons have been back recently, given how busy things have been around the base. But this certainly isn’t how she last left it. 

There’s nothing there. It’s a shell of a home, not fallen down, not in disrepair, more like it had never really been built. The interior walls are hollow, just the wooden framework in place, waiting still to be covered in plaster and paint. Floorboards remain bare, un-sanded, unfinished, and there are cracks in the ceiling that don’t lead to the apartment above. 

Daisy stares up into one, trying to discern anything in the bright blackness, waiting for her eyes to adjust to whatever light is there. Stars emerge. If she knew constellations she wonders if she would recognize any there, or if this is a different night sky than the one she’s spent her life looking up into. 

Another rumble shakes the building, but not the room they’re standing in. 

“What do we do?” Daisy looks to FitzSimmons, who are staring at each other in silent conversation, silent conversation that she definitely does not understand.

Fitz breaks away first. 

“You should just be able to…” He waves his hands, makes a popping noise with his lips.

“Wish for Kansas.” Simmons fills in.

Daisy rolls her eyes but is cut off from her response by another shockwave. This one does shake the room, and strips away the outer walls of the apartment. Beyond them is a darkness which is at the same time a brightness, the same one she was peering at through the cracks. But also, if she looks with half an eye, there is the street which the apartment block sits on, perfectly normal, as if they actually are on the East Coast. It hurts her mind to look at, both appearing but neither visible. 

Instead she turns to the group, who seem to be making a similar choice. 

“Where the hell did he go?” Fitz points to the gap in the space where Ward was a second ago. 

“It doesn’t matter, he’s dead.” Thankfully.

“What?” May cuts in.

“It’s a story we don’t have time for,” Simmons answers. “We need to out of here before the whole thing collapses.”

Fitz nods, opens his mouth to start spewing science before Daisy cuts him off. 

“Just wish for home, right?”

He nods, then looks down at his hand, intertwined with Jemma’s. 

“See you soon,” he whispers. Then Daisy watches as his hand fades out of view, and Jemma’s palm grips around nothing but air. 

~~

Simmons opens her eyes back on the Zephyr. Beside her, Daisy also gasps awake. Elena sigh with relief, muttering something in Spanish and one of the red shirts actually claps. 

It only takes another few seconds before one of the screens starts blaring, flashing red, announcing a non-secure message coming through. Everyone rushes past her to the screens. 

Jemma’s eyes fall shut, her heart adjusting back into its proper position in her chest and her breath renewing in her lungs. Oxygen seeps through her deprived tissue, reminiscent of the first breath after a deep dive. The others pay her no mind. 

She sighs, “Fitz.”

**The End.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand that's it! I just want to say a final thank you to everyone who's been reading and leaving comments throughout this fic, you all mean the world to me. Seriously, you've all been awesome and the response to this fic has been amazing. And sorry to get so sappy on you all at the end here, it's just that this fic has taken me through moving out on my own for the first time and to a new country so I'm unreasonably nostalgic.   
> And I hope that everyone enjoys the episode tomorrow! I've still got no idea how I'm going to watch it but I know it's going to be better than this fic lmao

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think and as always I'm around on Tumblr @sinkingsidewalks.


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